David Garneau Wants You to Look Again

Ask acclaimed Métis artist and University of Calgary alum David Garneau what he'll be doing on June 21, National Indigenous Peoples Day, and he doesn't hesitate.

Garneau, BFA'89, MA'93, will be guiding a public walk under Edmonton's Tawatina Bridge , just as he did last year and the year before that, explaining the symbolism and stories behind the 543 paintings that span the underbelly of the LRT bridge.

"Each picture is a storytelling prompt," explains the University of Regina visual arts professor, whose latest provocative exhibitions, Dark Chapters and Reading the Ruins, are on view at Calgary's Military Museums until late August.

It's more important that people want to do, or see, something out of their own free will - not out of a sense of duty.

The sprawling collage-like work on the bridge drew on ideas shared by First Nations Elders and Knowledge Keepers, Métis citizens, and realized by a team of a dozen First Nations, Black, Asian and European artists, guided by Garneau.

Not one to prescribe what people should do on June 21, Garneau says: "It's more important that people want to do, or see, something out of their own free will - not out of a sense of duty."

The exact philosophy that shapes Dark Chapters and Reading the Ruins.

Built around over 100 still-life paintings, the two exhibitions are filled with recurring symbols: bison heads, Métis sashes, rocks, ropes - even Sunlight soap - and, perhaps most strikingly, wordless books. The silent volumes suggest the pull of the past into the present - reminders that many Indigenous stories and teachings were traditionally oral, rather than written.

Yet the exhibitions resist easy interpretation. In their enigmatic, but provocative way, their titles pose a quiet challenge: What if understanding the present requires excavating the past?

The Power of Small Things

To understand why Garneau turned to still-life painting, it helps to understand the genre's place in art history. Long relegated to the bottom tier of European painting, still lifes traditionally depicted domestic objects - vases, fruit, teacups - rather than grand narratives of war, religion or power.

More inclined toward painting large canvases, Garneau was pushed in a different direction during COVID, when working in a tiny home studio forced him to think small. Once Garneau began painting specific objects, he found he couldn't stop. In a sense, Garneau is repainting history - elevating both marginalized stories and a historically marginalized genre.

In time, Garneau's still-life paintings of bones, rocks, apples and books evolved into symbols exploring the tension between Indigenous and Western understandings of knowledge - and eventually became the book Dark Chapters. Between its covers, readers find paintings and texts that place colonial institutions alongside Indigenous ways of knowing. Move through the exhibitions at The Military Museums and those tensions appear everywhere: in rocks wrapped in rope, books pinned beneath stones, bison skulls bandaged in bubble wrap, rifles displayed beside beadwork and other ceremonial objects.

In one section, Garneau recalls pulling objects from the museum's collection - rifles, handcuffs and a buffalo coat - that he carefully unwrapped while researching and photographing them, later turning them into some of the paintings, now on display. Surrounded by a museum, filled with military artifacts and stories of conquest, the placement of these objects feels intentional and metaphorical, rather than accidental. The juxtaposition asks uncomfortable questions about power, preservation and who gets to tell history.

Reading Symbols

Stand in front of the painting of a bison skull on a Hudson's Bay blanket. The classic stripes of black, yellow and red on a white background are there. Someone might say, "'Oh, those are the four sacred colours of the plains.'"

Garneau points out otherwise, "If you look at the 1901 Census in Canada, you had to declare whether you were black, white, yellow or red. Where did anyone get the idea that Asian people are yellow and Indigenous are red? It's a racist concept that has been absorbed by everyone, even Indigenous folks."

Dubbed "Métis complicity," Garneau has left breadcrumbs throughout the exhibit that are "meant to destabilize and challenge all of us."

Realizing nothing is always at first what it seems - stop a moment at Attempted Enlightening . Why is a bar of yellow Sunlight soap sitting atop a stack of seven wordless books? Why not a bar of Dove or Irish Spring? The bright yellow bar carries multiple associations: warmth, care, cleansing. But it also evokes something more troubling - purification and the violence of being "cleaned up."

Garneau explains that, as a teen in the late 1970s, he worked at Atonement home camp at Lac Ste. Anne and in a residential home in Edmonton. "The home was run by nuns. Most of the children were Indigenous who had been temporarily removed from unsafe homes," he says. "I remember one kid scrubbing themselves with this soap, saying they were trying to get the brown off. And just the other day I was talking to a well-known Métis poet who emphasized the importance of cleanliness among Métis. Was this a legacy of Indigenous folks assumed to be unclean inside and out?"

Using metaphor as a favourite device in his works, Garneau explains that everyone will get something different out of the exhibits. "Metaphor means that you carry so much of what you experience," he says, adding that, "if your memory of, say, Sunlight soap is doing dishes at summer camp for kids, you are going to view the painting differently than someone who tried to remove what someone in power saw as their deficit."

Even if you miss the metaphor, Garneau's paintings stand alone as beautiful works.

Across the gallery, on the opposite wall of "sunlight," you'll find the finely detailed portrait of a hawk, Faith , its regal beak curled against a windowpane, accompanied by the Susan Musgrave poem, The Resting Heartbeat of a Wounded Bird, which ends with "You have to want me more than you fear me/Let me rest my faith in you/Let me touch you with a gloved hand."

Those counterbalances and emotional tugs thread together both Dark Chapters and Reading the Ruins . While both exhibits are displayed in the Founders Gallery, it's hard to cleave them apart. Dark Chapters is a travelling exhibition inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which decried the residential school system as "one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our nation's history." Reading the Ruins continues the vein of still life paintings and political conflicts to contemplate current conditions in Ukraine and Gaza and the ongoing legacy of Dark Times that followed the repression of Metis people. It is near the back wall of the gallery that you'll find several of Garneau's latest paintings featuring NWMP-era artefacts from the holdings of UCalgary's Libraries, Special Collections and Archives, sparked by a field trip he took here in 2025.

Objects of Power

A trip that made Garneau uncomfortable. "There's a long painting of a rifle, that I didn't enjoy making," he admits. "As a non-violent person, I didn't even like touching the rifle."

The opposite of that sensation is the highly tactile still lifes of chubby tubes of paint pinched and twisted into colourful piles that remind Garneau of English artist Henry Moore's drawings of people huddled in bomb shelters during the London Blitz of the Second World War. "As a young person, he was my favourite artist," he says, adding that he was also thinking of Montreal-born artist Philip Guston's piles of paint tubes while working on these pieces. "The actual tubes of paint, which I loved touching, belonged to Saskatchewan-born sculptor Joe Fafard," and on and on the associations, links and meanings are made. And stored. And survive.

Besides stacks of paint tubes, you'll find paintings of bones, piled high. And skulls - plenty of skulls. "That's because my main themes are the classic still life-themes: memento more (remember death) and vanitas (the earthly pleasures that soon fade and pass)," says Garneau.

But again - the edges, the irony, the humour are always being toyed with by Garneau.

Scattered throughout the gallery are some of the most luscious still-lifes - Garneau's bowls of peeled fruit: pears, oranges, apples, all bathed in a warm glow. Ah, but there it is: the edge. Right there on the fruit is a perfectly painted, all-too-realistic fly. Look a little closer and the pear appears to almost decay before your eyes. There's another fly. The skin on that apple is puckered. The orange doesn't look as juicy.

Is Garneau always challenging conventions, or is he laughing at us, prompting us to examine what unsettles us?

He refuses to answer. He isn't here to tell viewers what to think - on June 21 or any other day. Whether beneath a bridge or inside The Military Museums, Garneau's work functions as a storytelling prompt: an invitation to sit with history, question inheritance and consider who gets to tell the story.

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Dark Chapters and Reading the Ruins are on view until Aug. 30. at the Founders' Gallery at The Military Museums, 4520 Crowchild Tr., S.W. Calgary.

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