Joyce Wieland at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

By Michael Davidge

Pucker Up! The Lipstick Prints of Joyce Wieland is billed as a vignette exhibition, presented in association with a major retrospective of Wieland’s work, Heart On, that just closed in Montreal and will be opening at the AGO in Toronto in the coming month. Celebrating an acquisition that completes the National Gallery’s collection of Wieland’s so-called lipstick prints, this show is an amuse-bouche in relation to the travelling survey; nevertheless, when considered alongside works by other artists currently on view at the gallery, Pucker Up!’s limited scope still underscores Wieland’s concerns with equity and cultural sovereignty in a manner that resonates with current debates.

Joyce Wieland, O Canada, 16 December 1970, lithograph on wove paper (© National Gallery of Canada; photo: NGC)

Central to Pucker Up! is O Canada, perhaps the most well-known work in the series, in which a succession of red lipstick prints on wove paper is understood to mouth the lyrics of the Canadian national anthem. This, like the other lipstick prints, was created with lipstick rather than the oil-based inks typically used in lithography. A large didactic panel on an opposing wall describes the background and the process of the print’s production at NSCAD, including a series of photos of Wieland pressing her lips to a litho stone. Riding on a crest of public optimism about the nation and occurring only a few years after the adoption of O Canada as the national anthem, Wieland’s fervent embrace of her homeland, as additionally evidenced in her solo exhibition True Patriot Love in 1971, was at once playful, sensual, comical, and political.

Joyce Wieland, The Arctic Belongs to Itself, 1973, lithograph on wove paper (© National Gallery of Canada; photo: NGC)

There is an evanescent quality to these prints, as they only partially capture a declarative act. Simultaneously, they successfully record an expression of something coming into being. This gives them the appearance of having a temporary status that at once recognizes a challenge to their perpetuity. The relationship of the exhibited works to politics is reinforced by the inclusion of an excerpt of Wieland’s 1972 film Pierre Vallières. Considered by the artist to be part of the ongoing body of work she called “mouthscapes,” the film was made with the eponymous FLQ militant shortly after his release from prison. While the camera keeps a tight close-up on his mouth, Vallières speaks of the oppressive forces that will undoubtedly respond to any assertion of independence in opposition to the status quo. The nature of the response, outside of the walls of the museum, is what matters.

While Wieland’s vision for Canada at the time she was making these works is definitely appealing, an adjacent space in the Indigenous and Canadian Art galleries includes a complement of works that expand the view. Contemporaneous textile pieces by French Canadian artist Micheline Beauchemin and Inuk artist Naomi Ityi assert both cultural diversity and a commonality. More significantly, a contemporary photo series from 2021 by Greg Staats entitled 1969 is there to intervene in the historical sequence of the galleries. Staats’s work is an acid acknowledgement that, the year that Wieland began to work in earnest on declaring her true patriot love, there were systemic deficits that existed and continue to exist for Indigenous peoples.

I recalled Wieland again during my visit while viewing the New Generation Photography Award exhibition, where I encountered the work of asinnajaq, a Canadian Inuk artist from Inukjuak, Quebec. Featuring details of nature and terrain, her prints, unframed and affixed to the wall with magnets, or on a piece of synthetic fabric bunched up in the centre of space, reminded me of the provisional and performative aspects I discerned in Wieland’s work. Through artworks like The Arctic Belongs to Itself (also included in Pucker Up!), Wieland raised awareness about Indigenous rights and the threat of environmental devastation. asinnajaq expresses a love of the land in accordance with Inuit values. Her extraordinary holding piece from 2023 is a video that documents her engagement with the Anárjohka river on the border of Finland and Norway. The sound of the peaceful rippling and gurgling of the water in the video fills the rest of gallery, while a monitor shows the artist making her way against the current, either caressing the rocks on the bottom or gripping them, as she gets pushed back or moves forward in the stream. The video suggests that an act of loving care can also be an act of resistance. Made in collaboration with the Sámi and Finnish artist Sunná Nousuniemi, it points to the necessity of taking a planetary as opposed to a national approach to these issues.

Pucker Up! The Lipstick Prints of Joyce Wieland continues until October 26.
New Generation Photography Award continues until June 1.
National Gallery of Canada: https://www.gallery.ca/
The gallery is accessible.

Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and arts worker who lives in Ottawa. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications.

Joyce Wieland at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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