Fern Helfand, Tannis Nielsen and Samuel Roy-Bois consider the concept of privilege, and what this means to different people. The three artists, all from varying backgrounds and cultures, brought three separate lenses to this installation, creating a complex dialogue between the works, and the issues they explore.
Fern Helfand is a photo-based artist whose work most often reflects and comments on the environments and cultures in which she has lived and traveled. Since receiving an MFA from the University of Florida she has held positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario and Visiting Professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. After teaching photography and digital imaging for twenty years at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, she recently became a UBC Professor Emeritus and is currently embarking on new exciting adventures in art making, travel, and life.
For more information about Helfand and her work, please visit her website.
Tannis Nielsen is a Métis Woman (of Sohto/Anishnawbe and Danish descent) with twenty years of professional experience in the arts, cultural and community sectors, and nine years teaching practice at the post-secondary level. Tannis holds a Masters in Visual Studies Degree (M.V.S.) from the University of Toronto, an Art and Art History-Specialist Degree from U of T, as well as a Diploma in Art and Art History from Sheridan College, in Oakville, Ontario. Her she engages in the process of creation/of art making, both as a quest for seeking knowledge and also as a mechanism for carrying this knowledge forward.
For more information about Nielson and her work, visit her website.
Originally from Quebec City, Samuel Roy-Bois is currently residing in Vancouver. He acquired his BFA from Université Laval in Quebec (1996) and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal (2001). His installations have been shown across Canada and internationally. Roy-Bois is interested in the ways architecture and, in a broader sense, the built environment, contribute to our understanding of the world.
For more information about Roy-Bois and his work, visit his website.
What does it mean to be the problem? // Interpretive Essay by Ruthann Lee
In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, the head of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, infamously stated: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem ... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department.” Scott expanded the Indian Act so that Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families and put into Canada’s church-run residential schools. The goal was to “kill the Indian in the child” and assimilate or eliminate Indigenous peoples by denying their language and cultural traditions.1
Between 1831-1996, over 150,000 residential school children suffered from sexual and physical abuse, shame, starvation, and lack of medical care. Upon entry into the schools, students would often have their hair cut short and clothes burned as Anglo-Christian educators tried to “civilize” and erase their Indigenous identities. The traumatic inter-generational impacts of this system are finally being publicized with the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.2
Such is the brutal reality represented by Tannis Nielsen’s extensive arrangement of human hair, nails, burnt wood, and charcoal. Placed near the life-sized portrait of white Jewish children in blackface and “Indian” costumes at a southern Ontario summer resort during the 1960s, Nielsen’s jarring installation unsettles the innocent poses of white children by reminding the viewer of Canada’s violent goal to create a unified colonial nation under the guise of salvation, progress and development.
Given this sobering history, Fern Helfand’s massive photo installation provokes audiences to rethink the so-called “Indian problem” and relocate the problem of Canadian racism onto white people. Helfand asks white viewers: “What does it mean to be the problem?” Her work suggests that one becomes white in Canada by participating in settler colonial and racist practices. The photographs indicate that despite being haunted by anti-Semitic persecution, Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors are invited to earn privileges by investing in white supremacy and the ideas so deeply ingrained in Canadian understandings of race. These ideas are written in the turn of the century Canadian geography textbook pages placed on the back of Helfand’s suspended Plexiglass-encased images. Many Canadian citizens continue to believe in racial hierarches and cannot fathom why costumes that stereotype Indigenous and black identities are harmful and offensive. The costumes convey how violent histories of Indigenous genocide and black slavery are easily dismissed in a consumer society that celebrates the commodification of bodies, land, and labour.
Two contributions by Samuel Roy-Bois invite audiences to unpack their personal assumptions about race. The strategically placed mirror literally reflects how racial identities are located within complex and overlapping histories of dislocation and settlement.
Overall, What does it mean to be the problem? encourages viewers to move beyond feelings of guilt, and rather take the responsibility to resist and confront uneven relations of power, privilege, and oppression.3
1Pamela Palmater, “Canada’s Residential Schools Weren’t Killing Culture, They Were Killing Indians.” Rabble.ca, June 9, 2015. http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/pamela-palmater/2015/06/canadas-residential-schools-werent-killing-culture-they-were-
2Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. TRC Findings, 2015. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=893
3Lynn Gehl, “Settler Ally Resources.” Lynn Gehl’s website. http://www.lynngehl.com/settler-ally-resources.html