PROVENANCE
VisionQuest Gallery, Calgary
Acquired from the above by Dr. Luigi Rossi, 2005
Estate of Dr. Luigi Rossi

Alex Janvier is one of the many Indigenous artists of his generation who went through Canada’s Indian residential school system, undermining cultural continuance and sovereignty as it forced assimilation. At the age of eight, he entered Blue Quills residential school near St. Paul, Alberta, approximately 100 kilometres from where he was born on the Denesuliné reserve of Le Goff, Cold Lake First Nations. Despite being impacted by colonial government policies, Janvier gained national renown for his vibrant abstract art from the 1960s. By 1973, when he painted Rag Doll Mission, Janvier had developed his distinctive style.

In this dynamic work, the intensity and perceived joyfulness of the colours produce ambiguity of meaning when considered in relation to the title. The pulsating yellow is in sharp contrast to the cool tones of blue and purple, and the blood-red trailings spiral out towards the edges with a frenetic energy. The circle near the centre of the composition calls to mind the target motif of Janvier’s contemporary, the Abstract Expressionist artist Jasper Johns, although the meanings are quite different. Where Johns is referencing a known symbol as a way to emphasize materiality, for Janvier the circle is a motif with spiritual potency appearing within his earliest work and continuing through. What is depicted inside the circle is ever changing but the form is omnipresent as a “metaphor for the cycle of life.”[1]

From the late 1970s into the 1980s and onwards, Janvier even shaped the actual canvases into a circular form. Often referred to as the first Indigenous modernist artist in Canada, he was able to consolidate a modernist aesthetic while transmuting an Indigenous cosmology: “beatific icons of Plains Indianness, derived from the traumatic visual culture of residential school, and biomorphic abstraction, informed by Dene material culture and the Bauhaus pursuit of a universal language of abstraction.”[2]

As with many of Janvier’s works from 1966 to 1977, Rag Doll Mission was signed along with his treaty identification number 287. During this time, he often signed his work to include the number or signed only with the number, a practice in protest against what was done to him by the federal government.[3] In 1966, the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) commissioned works for an exhibition in Ottawa. Janvier was prolific, producing 80 paintings, 38 of which were sold by DIA. The others, the department appropriated. The way Janvier stylized the numeral 7 in his treaty number was to reference “a family symbol, inscribed by his father on trees.”[4] As Greg A. Hill notes in his curatorial essay for the National Gallery of Canada’s 2016 retrospective of Janvier’s work, “[t]he mark thus has a direct link to the Land and the artist’s memory of experience there.”

This painting was completed a few years after the international exposure Janvier and other First Nations artists had at Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montreal. Its bright, sunflower-yellow colour field crossed by curving, shape-shifting forms draws the viewer in, transmitting a kinetic energy while also suggesting glimpses of life-sustaining water or a clear blue sky. Rag Doll Mission, with its enigmatic and coded abstraction, conveys both the fraught realities and emancipatory aspirations of its time.

We thank Leah Snyder, digital designer and writer, The L. Project, for contributing the above essay. Snyder writes about culture, technology and contemporary art; she is a regular contributor to the National Gallery of Canada’s Gallery magazine and other Canadian art publications.

1. Katherine Stauble, “Alex Janvier: The Circle of Life and Other Brilliant Forms,” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, December 19, 2016, https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/exhibitions/alex-janvier-the-circle-of-life-and-other-brilliant-forms-0.

2. Chris Dueker, in Alex Janvier: Modern Indigenous Master (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2016), by Greg A. Hill et al., exhibition catalogue, 45.

3. Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. “Alex Janvier,” by Gerald R. McMaster, 2008, last updated July 11, 2024, by Daniel Baird, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca.

4. Hill et al., Alex Janvier, 21.

For the biography on Dr. Luigi Rossi in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars