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Rewind: Hannah Claus

Gallery Connexion, Fredericton

Identity art—art that speaks exclusively to or privileges the expression of the artist’s heritage/ethnicity—usually leaves me cold. Too often, the presentation of the artist’s identity is more important than the actual act of expression: aesthetics play second fiddle to ethno-cultural proclamations, and the work labours under its own didacticism and lack of visual punch.

Hannah Claus, a New Brunswick–born artist of mixed aboriginal and European heritage, is one of a handful of genealogy-inspired artists (video artist bh Yael also comes to mind, as does the painter Ed Pien) who overturn this perennial dynamic to place beauty above bloodlines, style over specialty. Her latest installation, Pine, is a quiet but vigorous exploration of her multiple identities, and a delight to the senses.

Deceptively simple, Pine is comprised of two large works: a floor projection of a classic William Morris rug and a tub-sized paper disc illuminated from the back. At first glance, the installation looks dull, even underdeveloped. However, when the viewer is encouraged to step on the projection and inspect the disc more closely, the show transforms itself into a witty play on the illusory, fleeting and insecure concept of identity.

The projected image of the rug perfectly covers a low, soft and fragrant bed of long pine needles that can only be seen when the viewer steps onto the image. A delicious parlour trick, the needle rug acts on both sensual and intellectual levels—causing the viewer to engage in a very tactile way Claus’s wry conflation of the bluntly natural and the highly artificial.

A symbol of Victorian industry, the William Morris rug flattens and distorts the needles, a traditional medicine and craft material, just as the European consolidation of power in the 1800s smothered aboriginal cultures. Despite such overtly political statements, however, the work seems more commemorative than angry—the pine needles, after all, still smell the same, still retain the ability to comfort and refresh.

Similarly, the giant white paper screen appears, at first, to be featureless, literally a blank screen. Only by close inspection can the viewer see the thousands of tiny pinpricks that puncture the paper, forming an intricate floral pattern that looks like a combination of aboriginal beadwork patterning (the artist’s ancestry is part Mohawk) and Maritime granny doilies (which I can recognize genetically). The backlighting causes the pattern to repeat itself in faint traces on the opposite wall; traces that resemble a starred sky. Again, Claus skilfully blends organic and constructed tropes to illuminate both the distance between and the interdependence of her two familial cultures.

If Pine sounds coy, or even cloying, and you consider Claus’s unostentatious wit too subtle for the troubled history she addresses, what saves this work from being merely a polite version of an impolite polemic is its strong sense of forgiveness and decorum. Rugs, doilies, stars and pine needles are hardly the stuff of Burnt Church blockades or Oka standoffs, nor are these gentle symbols carefully and lovingly overlapped by accident.

Pine is a thoughtful, meditative work, not a placard—and, as such, it is far more instructive.

Spring 2003

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