Exploding Indians, The Art of Roger Crait “I have prepared one of my own [timecapsules]. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.” Alfred Hitchcock Roger Crait mixes colour, paint and brushstrokes like gunpowder compounds on canvas creating incendiary cityscapes exposing and exploding the paradox of an urban Aboriginal experience. Revealing the fatalistic human condition, Roger’s paintings echo the anomalous invention of gunpowder used by the Chinese in festive fireworks belying its significance in the subsequent colonial warfare in the decline of indigenous populations in the Americas. Roger appropriates these explosive histories mounting an advance bombardment of imagined justice, hope and cynicism. He evidences an imagined moment of revolution and apocalypse, the upheaval precipitating a return to balance1. Roger’s iconography is relative to his experience in which frenzied strokes of paint and frenetic cityscapes hide collaged ephemera, such as tipis, American Indian Movement insignias, Indian logos and images. These underlying elements are hints to and a longing for original stories and lands. In Roger's work there is a seeking, like a strategic missile, probing identity and belonging in the reality of a globalized and colonial world. In his painting Give a Man a Fish, Roger interrupts the usual rectangular canvas by creating a fish-shaped, cut-out panel. The title suggests the saying “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.” However, in Roger's multicolored fatalistic pop universe the supposedly transparent wisdom of this cliche becomes a decidedly tragic dilemma; when you can neither give a man a fish nor teach him to fish because all of the fish are dead. In his series of work on canvas; Where’s the Shame in being a Shaman?, Space Shuttle- Bad Dream, Chaos, Museums, Drunktanks, Booscans and Banks and Babble on, Babylon…Babel on, helicopters, planes and explosions litter the sky in an ongoing war. Horizons are a depiction of ravenous flying machines of colonial culture but these iron-birds are also messengers carrying prayers to the Creator and conveying indigenous prophecies of a world out of balance2. It is a conflict of ideologies, a hidden and silent combat that exists every day in Canada as a colonized country, a war between the indigenized land, the borders and bureaucracy. Despite or because of this heavy past, a sense of irony and sinister play are harnessed in Roger's work. Complex histories, aboriginal identity and political systems become a visual language. This is not an 'indian' iconography of pastoral scenes of noble savages, beads and feathers; rather this is a savage iconography of city, sky, and explosions. " I do not understand "Native Art" the symbols, eagles, feathers, sunset, sunrise, meaning of colour, what animal means what, and so on."3 Although Roger's cityscape appears to be any city, his roots in Winnipeg have been a part of his development as an artist. This includes his associations with artist collectives like the "26" collective or 'orangelab". An immediacy of expression and a need to release it are features of much of Winnipeg’s contemporary art scene, like the Royal Art Lodge and other local artists who have gained international attention4. The city's large urban aboriginal population creates a unique setting for artists of aboriginal heritage where there is a constant push and pull towards urban integration and aboriginal roots. Bursting with colour, explosions rupture the infinite cityscape, sky battle flowers bloom in fields, hidden windows of skyscrapers are branded with the word hope, and tipis border the city looming as a promise of justice. In his artist statement, Roger asks an (unnamed) elder to look at his work. Upon seeing the work the elder says, “Oh you're Cree...because you paint with Cree colours."5 Roger distances himself from a reading as a 'Native' artist while at the same time he paints his world as one he inherits from dual and conflicting histories. In the recent exhibition Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, curators Gerald McMaster and Joe Baker frame the work of emerging indigenous artists. These artists are not compelled to reflect a 'traditional' aboriginal or tribal identity and instead are challenging perceptions and articulating new visual identities. “All the artists share various degrees of Native ancestry, but they do not want this to be the only way they are defined,” states Gerald McMaster, Art Gallery of Ontario’s curator of Canadian Art. “The world has become a fusion of culture, nationality and ethnicity. These artists use their heritage to carve a new path, creating a distinctiveness that is different than their tribal identity of the past6. Roger belongs to this trajectory of emerging indigenous identities. An examination of National versus personal and indigenized identity can be read into Roger’s triptych painting, Control, Conquer and Consume. He appropriates the Canadian flag to ask is Blood Thicker Than Country? Roger is not painting a history lesson - he is regurgitating one. Canadian nationalism as represented by the flag are deconstructed, spilled out in red dripping paint, questioned and defaced. In Unfinished Business, a surprisingly minimalist work, Roger evokes ideas of classroom theories and manifest destinies. The work's chalkboard looking surface with whiteout smears in the upper left corner and the words unfinished business written across the surface in black charcoal look simple, but their associations are loaded. Chalkboards are used to carry official lessons with colonial points of view forced onto indigenous histories and identities, white washing lands and complex cultural systems. There is much 'unfinished business' when it comes to social justice and equality for Aboriginal people. Roger's sense of fatalistic humour and his backslap to dominant colonial narratives are embodied in the found object installation component of the exhibition. Eskimo Scenery consists of a 1950's stainless steel milk fridge turned on its side and whitewashed inside with the jagged charcoal words Eskimo scenery emblazoned on its surface. He refers to the 1950s as '"when times were swell, two children, solid gas guzzling car made of steel, white picket fence and Eskimos."7 This description of the 1950s is a satirical look at deeply embedded racism and systemic oppression. Roger takes this imagined and nostalgic period of Canadiana and literally turns it on its side. Presenting the fridge horizontally, with its white-washed interior, the artist takes this symbol of a dominant cultural narrative and tags it with a sardonic graffiti as Marcel Duchamp did with a latrine. Street writing and graffiti have become forces of empowerment in Roger's work. Uniting elements in his work are the scrawling letters from the artists' hand, the signature of perspective, these are worlds seen through the artists’ eyes, as ' addressing political standpoints seen through the eyes of myself, a Metis being born half White and half Aboriginal.'8 Roger's paintings are shrapnel; fall out from a world where big banks and corporate advertising are infinitely more valued than indigenous knowledge. The city becomes the great equalizer where everyone can work hard and achieve a part of the middle-class dream of consumerism. His paintings are messengers archiving a society in ruin, hidden histories, apocalyptic dreams and infinite battles of justice. Spirits of iron messengers exploding with cautionary visions, unraveling colonial fantasy, Roger does all this in his frenetic cityscapes inserting himself, marking his territory in jagged script, a land claim on canvas. Tania Willard Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation, has been working with Aboriginal youth, community, story and the arts for over 10 years. An honors graduate from the University of Victoria, her groundbreaking work with Redwire Magazine, a national Aboriginal youth magazine, led the organization to be one of the first independent Aboriginal youth run arts and media organizations. Currently a board member with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, Willard continues to contribute to Aboriginal arts. Tania has worked as an artist in residence with Gallery Gachet in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, a writer in residence with Native Women in the Arts and the Banff Centre's fiction residency. Collection's of Willard's work include the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and Kamloops Art Gallery. Her recent work with Stanley Park's environmental art project focuses on Aboriginal presence and absence in Stanley Park through the philosophy of the Cedar Tree as the tree of life. Recently awarded a curatorial residency with grunt gallery, Tania has worked with grunt gallery to coordinate their community arts conference and publication, Live in Public: The Art of Engagment and recent online gallery projects including Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture, Dana Claxton’s retrospective and the First Visions site.