Indigenous artist up for Saskatchewan Arts Award in Excellence
- Andréa Ledding | October 13, 2016
Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist Lori Blondeau notes her mother is artistic and her brother is famed visual artist Edward Poitras. Maybe her latest coup, a Saskatchewan Arts Award nomination for Artistic Excellence, runs in the family.
“I grew up around art and I studied dance and then went and studied theatre at Native Theatre School in Toronto,” explained Lori. “Then I realized I didn't want to do theatre, I wanted to tell my own stories.”
Eventually she did a MFA in Art after a three-year apprentice with James Luna, a California-based artist.
“Then I just continued doing my art practice. And now there's no turning back.”
Although she also does installations and visual art, there is a unique aspect to performance art.
“It's about the here and now, it's live action: whatever the viewer takes from it, all you have is your memories as an audience member or viewer. Then it resonates more, because most people who witness performance art, they bring in their own experience into it, so they become a part of the performance in a way.”
In her closing MFA exhibition, she combined personal stories with her mother’s memories of Residential School family visits, missing the smell of home so much that her grandmother would toss her sweater over the fence so she could hug and smell it. As Lori shaved a poplar log down for the audience, it triggered her mother who began weeping with the smell of home — the poplar was her reserve’s usual firewood — and Lori stopped, eventually continuing but with significant alterations.
“I went back because I was going to put everyone in the enclosed area — but everyone was crying so I finished skinning the log and telling my mother's story and then put the log down on the ground and walked out.”
She notes it has taken several years for her to be able to tell that story. She traces her love of performance art to a 1983 movement and visual art show put on by Robin Poitras, who is receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award on October 17th, and was married to Lori’s brother.
“That was my first experience doing performance art,” noted Lori, adding that one woman shared that she had been afraid of Indigenous women prior to the experience. “That really struck me because it was a time where us four Indigenous young women and these four non-Indigenous women came to true reconciliation. It meant a lot because we changed those women's attitudes towards Indigenous people.”
She describes her performance art as high-tech storytelling, drawing from personal experience.
“My own stories, my mothers and grandmothers, I draw from the women in my life that are close to me, my experience being an Indigenous person living in this crazy time,“ she noted, adding that she always asks permission before sharing stories. Lately she’s been working with stones a lot, including the historic Mistassiny, blown up while creating the Gardiner Dam. “I wanted to pay homage to the people who have fought to preserve these sites, to these stones that represent who we are as Plains Indians. Elbow kept a remnant of Mistassiny at the Elbow marina so I did a photo shoot of me wrapped up in red velvet on top of it.”
She notes that Saskatchewan artists and artistic collectives are well-known across the country. Cofounder and director of the Tribe Aboriginal Arts organization since 1996, her own art has been the subject of significant scholarship, international shows, and has contributed to a growing body of research related to contemporary Indigenous art.
“We are leaders when it comes to the Arts.”