Rewind: Arthur Renwick
"Arthur Renwick" by Deborah Root from Canadian Art Summer 2004 pp. 84-85
Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto
In Arthur Renwick's "Delegates: Chiefs of the Earth and Sky," 11 black-and-white photographs of the South Dakota landscape speak to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed when indigenous South Dakota Sioux and Cheyenne came under attack after gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
Each photograph conveys the depth and sensuality of this landscape. There is a lushness to Renwick's images, a voluptuous quality apparent even in arid and rocky Badlands. In each image the landscape dissolves into an aluminum sky marked by punctuation symbols that originally appeared in the treaty's text.
In WAH-KE-YUN-SHAH (Red Thunder), coulees cut into the earth and undulate into the distance, the vegetation of their surface soft as fur. Details are crisp, with each stone and blade of grass standing out. The photographs capture the quality of a landscape that is always more than it first appears to be. In MO-TA-VAH-TO (Black Kettle), the relatively barren scene takes on a sensual beauty as a series of earthy waves fades into infinity under a sky punctuated by quotation marks. Despite the history of colonial violence on these lands, these images are not tragic. Rather, Renwick reveals that the land exceeds efforts to circumscribe it, name it, fence it off, adjudicate and control it in various ways.
The punctuation marks remind us of the ephemerality of language in the face of the land. The Dakotas—and indeed the Americas—have been the subject of much language—treaties, bills of sale, mining leases, expropriations and reservation allocations—but at some level the earth remains a place beyond language, untouched by all the words that seek to regulate it. Renwick emphasizes the punctuation marks by showing them in copper, a valuable substance in many First Nation societies.
"Delegates" is ultimately about memory, memory located both in the words that circumscribe a place and on the body of the earth where the remembered events took place. The images in the series are named after chiefs and warriors who sought to protect these territories. Renwick reminds us that the trace of their efforts remains not only in their names, but in the landscape itself.
Summer 2004
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