Additional Images

Provenance:

Janvier Gallery, Cold Lake, AB;
Private collection, Canmore, AB;
Private collection, Ontario

Note:

Though best known for his abstract, non-representational approach, figurative as well as narrative work formed parallel tracks in Janvier’s artistic practice for decades. In Southern Denesuline, faces peer out from Janvier’s stained-glass panes of colour. The artist has commented that the work represents the entangled, interwoven relationships between people, for in Janvier’s view, everything is connected.

Chris Dueker filmed Janvier painting Southern Denesuline in preparation for a profile he wrote on the artist, “Alex Janvier’s Entangled Cartographies.” Dueker’s thesis is that Janvier’s work is cartographic, teasing out the “ties between Janvier’s brush and Dene bush.” [1] As such, there may be diasporic connotations to the abstract landscape in Southern Denesuline. Indeed, curator Elizabeth McLuhan has referred to Janvier’s paintings as “cultural topographies, maps of human irrationality and tension,” [2] and Diana Nemiroff, in summarising Janvier’s own description of his work, writes that “in retrospect, the dominant, calligraphic line appearing in all his paintings might be likened to a road that maps a journey of self-discovery.” [3]

(1) Chris Dueker, “Alex Janvier’s Entangled Cartographies: Hunters’ Dreams, Bauhaus Aesthetics, and the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range.” Art History, vol 34, issue 3, 2011, p. 549.
(2) Elizabeth McLuhan, Tailfeathers/Sapp/Janvier: Selections from the Art Collection of the Glenbow Museum, (Thunder Bay: Glenbow Museum, 1982), 10.
(3) Diana Nemiroff, ‘Alex Janvier’, Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992), 162.