Norval Morrisseau: Medicine Currents
September 17 – December 17, 2023
Carleton University Art Gallery
Connect to the healing force of Norval Morrisseau’s work
“There’s lots of stories that are told in Ojibwe but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to draw them—that’s from my own self—my own idea what they look like.” (Norval Morrisseau, Return to the House of Invention, 1996, p. 92).
Through his innovative visual language, Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau gifted viewers a vision of our interconnected world expressed as a sense of balanced motion at play, understood as Mino Bimaadiziwin in Anishinaabemowin.
Medicine Currents features a range of paintings, drawings and objects by Morrisseau that celebrate the artist’s storytelling vocabulary. His work is richly infused with divided circles that express balance, good and evil, day and night, and heaven and earth, black lines of movement and power, and an increasingly vibrant use of colour. It is grounded in his clear understanding of the relationships between all living entities.
Medicine Currents offers a profound sense of the artist’s transformational and nurturing vision of land, sky and water. This exhibition unveils the healing aesthetic in and power embedded within Morrisseau’s work, which draws inspiration from the past, resonates in the present and envisions a transformative future.
Thank you! We acknowledge with gratitude the lenders whose generosity has made Medicine Currents possible: the Canadian Museum of History, John Cook, Indigenous Art Collection at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and Westerkirk Works of Art.
Curated by: Carmen Robertson and Danielle Printup
Artists in the exhibition: Norval Morrisseau
Credits: Medicine Currents is generously supported by Westerkirk Works of Art
Image credit: CUAG