MONTREAL.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting the world premiere of Joyce Wieland: Heart On. This exhibition brings together some 100 works that attest to the breadth and uncommon originality of Wieland’s (1930-1998) multifaceted practice that spanned five decades. Organized in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario, it highlights the predominant themes that informed the artist’s work – feminism, social justice, politics, the environment – as they emerged in her paintings, assemblages, textile works, films, prints and drawings. Heart On is the most ambitious retrospective of Wieland to date and fosters an appreciation of the major 20th-century international figure of art and cinema she was.
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“The MMFA is proud to be presenting the most comprehensive retrospective ever dedicated to Joyce Wieland and to pay tribute to this major Canadian artist, whose commitment to the environment, social justice, and gender equality is truly inspiring. We hope this exhibition will bring this pioneering artist the renewed attention she so rightly deserves,” says Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Chief Curator at the MMFA.
“We are excited to be able to bring together so many magnificent works by Joyce Wieland in this show. Visitors will discover the beauty of her sensational paintings, the layered wit of her textile pieces, and the eloquence of her experimental films, thereby gaining an understanding of the significant place she occupies in 20th art and seeing the relevance of her practice today,” says Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art at the MMFA.
“In putting together this exhibition, we were inspired by Wieland’s collaborative and generous spirit. With her seductive wit and piercing intelligence, Joyce Wieland asked us all to do better, to care more. It is our turn now to articulate the multifaceted nature of her practice, to remind audiences that her concerns are still very much our concerns. The years spent working to celebrate and foreground the fierce vision and joy at the core of Wieland’s art and life, has transformed our lives forevermore,” says Georgiana Uhlyarik, the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
EXHIBITION NARRATIVE
This retrospective is presented as a themed chronology in eight parts. It begins with her earliest paintings and drawings, when Wieland was associated with a generation of Torontonian artists whose work, like hers, was informed by a background in graphic design, film and animation. It was in this dynamic artistic milieu that she met her future husband, Michael Snow. Her works from this period, which spanned the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, trace her early engagement with international abstract art movements, when she experimented with the materiality of paint, including the incorporation of collage elements.
Moving on, the exhibition then examines Wieland’s forceful paintings from the early 1960s, demonstrating how she challenged dominant ideologies of the avant-garde visual art scene by using feminist strategies of subversion, often inserting female motifs into her works.
The 1960s were a significant decade in Wieland’s career, during which she established her reputation as an experimental filmmaker in the avant-garde milieu while also producing paintings, assemblages and textiles that she exhibited regularly in Toronto. This section of the exhibition juxtaposes her experimental films with what she called her “filmic paintings,” thus highlighting the parallels between her visual arts and cinematic practices. Her work in this period was permeated by overt political content reflecting the artist’s preoccupation with the issues facing her time.
The exhibition presents a number of hanging assemblages of varying scales that Wieland produced between 1966 and 1967. These works consist of sequences of stitched-together pieces of pliable, translucent plastic pouches stuffed with traditional quilting batting. Within these bright forms, she inserted an array of images showcasing current affairs and events as well as personal references. Moreover, the choice of plastic allowed Wieland to evoke her interest in film’s formal properties, both in terms of its texture and translucency (which is akin to celluloid) and its sequential format.
Wieland’s political engagement during her time in New York sharpened her awareness of Canadian identity politics, particularly regarding the overwhelming influence of the United States, as well as in the relationship between Quebec and Canadian identities. While making works for a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, she invited different craftspeople to work with her as a way to appropriate and feminize the country’s official symbols, including flags, anthems and political slogans. This exhibition features a significant selection of her textile works – quilted, embroidered, knitted – that underscore Wieland’s leadership in incorporating these techniques into the visual arts, which has contributed to their resurgence in contemporary art today.
One section of the retrospective is dedicated to the artist’s interest in the Arctic and her concern about the preservation of its ecology. While, in the Southern imagination, the region has often been perceived as barren and inhospitable, Wieland’s work about the Arctic is always fully alive and plentiful. This is certainly the case in her quilts Defend the Earth (1972) and Barren Ground Caribou (1978) – the largest quilts she ever produced – which are monumental and very public declarations of the ecological urgency to protect the planet.
The theme of love is woven throughout Wieland’s career, from the mid-1950s through to the early 1990s. It takes on an exquisite form in “The Bloom of Matter,” an extensive series of delicate, coloured pencil drawings that the artist began producing in late 1979.
The exhibition concludes with a presentation of Wieland’s late paintings, made after over a decade devoted to filmmaking and textile works. They poignantly recall Wieland’s early stained and colourful canvases, and have the same pulsating inner charge that first established her as a critical painter in Canada.
JOYCE WIELAND
Born and raised in Toronto, Joyce Wieland was one of Canada’s most prominent and prolific 20th-century artists. By 1960, Wieland was represented by the celebrated The Isaacs Gallery (Toronto), with whom she continued to exhibit until the late 1980s.
Beginning in 1962, she spent a decade in New York City where she became an active member of the burgeoning experimental film scene. Her time in the American metropolis heightened her ecological, political and feminist consciousness.
Wieland’s practice expanded to textile works, film and plastic assemblages in 1966 and 1967, challenging the notion that art functions apart from politics and daily life. She began making her signature quilts, collaborating with craftswomen from across Canada in a celebration of their artistic heritage.
She was the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada (1971) and the AGO (1987). In the 1980s, her films were shown in the United States, Japan and throughout Europe. She died in Toronto in 1998 from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. Her work has been collected by MoMA, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other major institutions.
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