"The Vanishing Canadian" Daniel Francis

One person who I find extremely interesting is Edward Curtis. Though many people documented Natives in North America , I feel that his work because it is photographic we think represents truth and documents things as it was. We know that paintings present misrepresentations of people but photographs seem to have more truth to them a lot of the time. In is also of interest that these are the only pictures that exist of some of these people and they are faked. What I do like about Curtis is he realized that these people were important and wanted to document them before they disappeared , problem being is he decided to represent a stereotype instead of reality. I think stereotyping is something that we all need to work on in the western world , even right now when I was picking an Edwards photo to use , I tried to pick one that to me represented the stereotypical Native to help illustrate my point.


Growing up some of the only Canadian artists I knew were the members of the group of seven and Emily Carr. Their landscapes embodied Canada to me. I was lucky enough to grow up down the road from J.E.H MacDonalds , one of the member of the group of sevens house. I can remember playing in the yard where he painted some of his paintings. It was always such a dreamlike place where I thought anything could happen

But now what I see is whats missing and to me what is missing in all of these photographs people who were here before we were. I think that all of these works represent that loss. In particular Emily Carrs , whose west coast paintings picture the artifacts left behind by the so called the " Vanishing Race".

"Colonialism" and "Imeperialism" Robert J.C. Young

I found this reading very interesting because I've never really thought about the differences between colonialism and imperialism before. I knew that both were forms of domination and subjection , but never thought of them being as closely linked as they are .

Growing up the only real form of imperialism that I ever really experienced was the cultural imperialism that the states holds over much of the Canadian media. Growing up all the tv shows we watched and most of the toys I played with came from the States. If my parents hadn't made an active effort to have Canadian cultural items around and take as to meseums and galleries , i world know very little about Canadian Culture.

I think that now I've started to reject the American Imperialism I feel better about who I am and what I am doing. By supporting smaller media outlets not just from Canadian but from around the world I think you can learn a lot more and see the world from varying perspectives. I think that there is starting to be a backlash towards the American Cultural Imperialism. As evident in Daniel Edwards work, a statue of Britney Spears giving birth, which I think acts to show how obbsessed some people have become withe the American idea of a Star.

I think it's important to learn the history of both colonialism and imperialism. I think it's important to open your eyes to the problems that others are facing world wide so that problems can start to be fixed and people can be recognized for who they are.

Part of my interest in taking this course was learning about the colonialism linked to Canada and Native Canadians. Being 7th generation Canadian , it means that my family was one of the first to settle this land . I think it's important as a decendent to learn about their wrongs so that I can a make an active effort not to be like them.

"Reading Art?" Mieke Bal

To me one of the best examples of showing off the new ideas that reading art brings about is this picture of a pipe tilted The Treachery of Images", with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) written across the bottom in French by Rene Magritte . Rene is asking us to look at objects and in specific painting in a new way . In linguistics it would be called the thick and thin definitions. To look at objects in a different way, we all say that this is a painting of a pipe , but we can not hold it in our hands , fill in with tobacco and smoke it .


To take a reading of Art even further we could say that we never really know that the real painting exists. We can assume that it exists somewhere in some way , but until we are standing in front of it in a museum all we can know this is this and other digitized version.



Another piece of art that makes us question the way we look at things is ' one and three chairs " by Joseph Kosuth . Here a chair is juxtaposed against a picture of a chair and than the definition of a chair .This representation highlights the relationship between referent , and the language and picture that we chose to represent it . In semiotics this would be the denotative and connotative meaning of the chair .

"The Post-Colonial and the Postmodern" Homi K. Bhabha

To me one some of the most interesting points that Bhabba makes are his ideas about culture extending outside the so called high art, and becoming an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value.

This reminded me of the Europeans who came to North America and started to purchase off of and trading with the Natives to obtain traditional objects such as masks. These were items that the Natives used in traditional ceremonies and in some cases were seen as scared. The Europeans saw them as pieces of art and displayed them in museums and in private collections.

These artifacts were put on display and for a lot of Europeans may have been their only contact with Native North Americans , from this lots of assumptions could have been made about the way they live and their culture. In many cases they weren't even displayed with the artifacts as the Europeans classed all the Natives as one and didn't recognize the distinct tribes that dotted the so called New World.

I think this example really shows the way the west saw those that they conquered and colonized . They were interested in very small amounts of their cultures that represent only a little of who they were . They didn't really respect the Natives as intelligent people and just saw them as something else to exploit whether for their land or their cultural artifacts such as the masks.