Article Database - Gallery Inspires Youth to Take a Stance

In June and July of 1998, the Edmonton Art Gallery organized Stance, a community project for First Nations inner-city youth. Stance provided the EAG with an excellent opportunity to support the empowerment of young Aboriginal artists. The project consisted of a working exhibition at the EAG in preparation for a 10' x 24' outdoor mural installed on the wall of an inner city building.

Nine young artists and workshop leader/artist, Kim McLain collaborated on Stance. Its purpose was to give arts-oriented youth, who at some point in their lives had spent time on the street, the opportunity to make a creative statement in the community of Edmonton.

The EAG began facilitating projects for youth at risk in 1997 with Spirit & Place, a workshop led by Domingo Cisneros, a Mexican-Canadian Mestiso artist. Cisneros worked with 10 young artists to develop an installation that presented natural and manufactured objects, gathered on the streets of Edmonton, in steel yards and in wilderness areas outside of the city. The installation of objects toured northern Alberta in 1997 and 1998 as part of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibitions Program.

Spirit & Place and Stance share the similar goal of connecting Aboriginal artists and arts-oriented inner-city youth, two communities traditionally underrepresented in public galleries.

Workshop leader/artist Kim McLain shaped the vision for the Stance mural project. Through study and manipulation of the self-portrait, the young artists worked collaboratively to represent identity. McLain states:

The intent of the project was to validate personal narratives and expand their sense of place, to allow the participants to explore their potential to construct their own realities as well as to help them see how they could enlarge their sphere of creativity. If you're coming from an inner-city background, from some sort of serious dysfunction in the home, I think it's easy to get the sense that you have no control over your identity, you're more susceptible to outside forces. This was one of the objectives of the Stance mural project: to show how through art you can control and manipulate identity using the visual self-portrait as a metaphor.

McLain is Cree, a member of Cold Lake First Nations, and has lived everywhere from the Northwest Territories, Montana, South Dakota and New Mexico, to numerous places around Alberta including Edmonton. He currently resides in southern California. More important in this case, McLain spent part of his youth in Edmonton's inner city, near the location where the completed mural was installed, an area where poverty, violence, drugs, prostitution and gangs are not uncommon. He remembers "both the excitement and the paranoia of the experience."

McLain's dedication to the project was in keeping with his commitment to Native youth initiatives, collaborative projects and community co-operation. He has completed many youth projects including the Native American Object Project and has written and illustrated a comic book entitled The Day Fox Shut Down the School.

Audience members were invited to interact with the artists as they developed the outdoor mural, constructing portraits and images in the Thought Space, a collaborative working studio. Throughout the project, the young artists were available to answer questions and respond to comments about their work.

In the Thought Space, the artists critically examined the immense scale portraiture of John Singer Sargent, the powerful images of Carl Beam and works by Barkley Hendricks, Chuck Close, Norval Morriseau, Adrian Piper, as well as numerous photographers and graffitti artists. In an exhibition on display nearby, McLain's own work also provided inspiration for the young artists. Primarily a painter, McLain uses everything from "telephone doodles" to photography and painting to construct personal statements about memory, desire and location. Often, his work deals with family breakdown, loss and trauma. For McLain, artistic expression is as much a personal narrative as it is social and cultural reconstruction. Resource materials were well used; books and slides filled the working space and spilled into McLain's exhibition space.

The Thought Space functioned as an artwork, an installation of large visual "portraits," personal statements and found objects. Pieces of a burned-out inner-city building were installed in the space, poetry and a large photocopy of a Canadian flag in a blue sky were put up on a 8' x 20' chalkboard wall. The space became a narrative of identity in the present, informed both by personal realities and critical study.

Research for the mural concentrated on the artists' imaginative present and future. One young artist, Wayne, created a larger-than-life mural image that had six arms and was surrounded by several tiny portraits of his face. Colour photocopies of his family, friends and several hands were collaged beneath him. The image is both emotionally moving and haunting as it reaches out to connect with the viewer in the realm of the imagination. In contrast, Wayne's preparatory artwork exhibited in the gallery was a stern portrait of himself. He appears standing in a shopping mall holding a sign "Large as Life, Twice as Bad." The facade is not immediately apparent to those who have not met the artist, actually a compliant, sympathetic person. He chose to label himself as "bad" defined as "good" in "cool speak." Wayne also hides a small polaroid behind his portrait. The snapshot is of himself smiling and waving from inside the window of an A Channel "Hummer." The humour of the "pull here" tag to view the photograph is a hint about the person behind the tough image. Wayne explains, "I wanted the portrait in the gallery space to be more real and the mural to be from my imagination." The Thought Space was, as the workshop leader stated, "probably one of the most truthful lies that you will ever see." The images in the Thought Space deceive intentionally and in so doing provide clues about desire and reality.

As the imaginative identities became tangible on paper, finding a sense of place became more possible for the nine artists. McLain states: "An identity is also a location; you're kind of like your own little country, you have your own rules, your own legislation and government. All the things we have as a nation we also have individually, personally-it's part of constructing place in the community." For most of the Stance artists, it was their first visual art experience outside of school, their first experience in the gallery and their first working experience with a professional artist. The artists were building their place in a community previously seen as inaccessible.

As curator for the project, I witnessed the evolution of the young artists' work as well as the empowerment that happened during the course of the process. On the first day of the workshop, the participants were asked to draw their names on the chalkboard wall. They could use any style they chose. Signatures were thoughtfully conceived as a whole but were very small in scale. By the end of the month-long workshop, the artists had created portraits that were 10 feet tall, included complex personal metaphors and integrated contemporary and historical art concepts. Self-consciousness, it seemed, had disappeared.

Sara's mural image, for example, was a large self-portrait without hands. The sophistication and simplicity of the image is powerful. She places images of cut out flowers beneath her. In her words, "At first I forgot to put hands on myself and then I thought that I would just leave it that way. I thought it would be sad, how I couldn't pick the flowers." The artists of Stance had worked together to communicate a sensitive narrative to the citizens of Edmonton and beyond, complete with despair and optimism.

The Stance mural was not a painting, rather it was a compilation of photography, drawing and painting that showcased a new large-scale digital printing technique. The mural and the Thought Space were intended to provoke a form of dialogue with the citizens of Edmonton, a reclamation of place, an analysis of the past and a vision for the future.

As Danielle Zyp from Vue Weekly Magazine wrote, "with the aid of imaging software, they could change a background of concrete to trees and blue sky-or, as one girl did, put a baby in their arms. The possibility of transformation became conceivable."

Stance was, in every sense, a community project. In addition to the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, 18 businesses and organizations supported the project including nine youth organizations that insured that the young artists were provided with essential services throughout the project. The Stance project was also recognized as an art class for credit with the Boyle Street Community Services School as well as a work experience program.

Kim McLain writes about the considerable necessity for the community to empower inner-city youth in his final message on the chalkboard wall

McLain presses a single hand-print onto the wall and writes his signature in small letters beneath the message, transitory in nature, a supportive gesture for enduring strength. The youth of today have a tremendous task. Our futures depend upon their courage and tenacity. The artists have completed the first step in making us aware of that fact.