Winyan

Lita Fontaine

Winnipeg Art Gallery

July 5, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Review by Summer Southernsky

 

 

Lita Fontaine, a Dakota, Anishinaabe, and Métis visual artist, brings a powerful message to Indigenous women in her solo exhibition Winyan at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. From traditional regalia to highly decorated cut-outs, the mixed media exhibition—pronounced wee-yahn, meaning “woman” in the artist’s Dakota language—explores what being an Indigenous woman means in today’s day and age. The exhibition depicts resistance to heteropatriarchal and colonial practices through vibrancy and empowering motifs. 

 

 

From traditional regalia to highly decorated cut-outs, the mixed media exhibition—pronounced wee-yahn, meaning “woman” in the artist’s Dakota language—explores what being an Indigenous woman means in today’s day and age.

 

 

Curated by Marie-Anne Redhead, Fontaine’s art exudes femininity, beauty, and survival. Fontaine tells me in a walk-and-talk through the gallery that as a young girl, she didn’t have much but the paper cut-out toys her mother gave her to help her learn who she was. Images of colourful dresses, buffalos, and tipis sparkle on the gallery walls, accented auditorily by the sound of a heartbeat coming from an installation in the second room. Her art became her medicine to heal because she didn’t want to get stuck in a cycle of intergenerational trauma. A didactic on the wall reads, “I had to find the beauty within myself to survive…”

 

 

 

 

One of the first works a gallery visitor encounters is a collage with a black-and-white photo of Fontaine’s mother, a residential school survivor, smiling confidently at the camera. In the work, Fontaine recollects her mother’s spirit name and work as a cleaner at the legislative building, using the cleaning skills she mastered at residential schools. Her mother also taught her to sew, a skill she used to make the regalia included in her show.

 

Along the walls spanning into the next room is a series of images of dresses with patterns, shapes, and reminders of her home on the prairies. When it comes to picking colours, it’s all about what makes the image glow, Fontaine tells me as we zero in on her drawings. This same strategy is used in her medicine wheel series where colours and sparkly pieces make glamorous circle designs.

 

 

 

 

“I tell people I did my masters in gluing,” Fontaine laughs. The 66-year-old artist says she spent most of her younger years making a living, surviving. As she enters this new era of her life, her advice to the younger generation of women is to be mindful of how we carry ourselves, get to know who you are, what you are, and why you are. “Find your medicine and go to that.”

 

As an Indigenous woman myself, this is a message I really needed to hear especially with all the violence going on every day, seen and unseen. Often when I leave the house, I tell my friends what I’m wearing in case I go missing. After viewing the exhibition, I feel inspired by the lesson of “beauty as survival” that Fontaine learned and shared through the didactic. It makes me want to be as beautiful as I want to be, without the fear of being targeted, and tell my friends what I’m wearing—not as a precaution, but instead to honour my femininity, beauty, and survival. 

 

 

 

 

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