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YAC Showcase/Jim Logan
YAC PERMANENT SHOWCASE
Yukon Arts Centre Permanent Art Collection. View entire collection at yukonartscentre.com/permanent-collection/ JIM LOGAN artist
The Artist and Musicians
Medium: serigraph, print Date: 1989
Inspired by his experiences as a lay minister in the Kwanlin Dün First Nation village from 1983 to 1988, Jim Logan (Cree/Sioux-Metis) documents the lives and often-harrowing experiences of the Indigenous community, many of whose members were survivors of the Canadian government’s residential schooling system. Logan’s compositions are powerful testaments to the stories of adversity, barbaric conditions, and resilience that were shared with him. The Artist and Musicians captures an intimate scene of a family playing music and making art together at home. In his distinctive faux-naive style, simplified fields are filled with bright colours and outlined in black, giving life and personality to his subjects. Photo Credit: Archbould Photography
A Re-Thinking On The Western Front
Medium: acrylic on canvas Date: 1992
The Death of Bigfoot
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Year: 1993
The Death of Bigfoot is one of 21 paintings in Jim Logan’s The Classical Aboriginal Series, where Indigenous stories are told by deconstructing masterworks from the classical canon. Logan dismantles the colonial framework of the National Gallery of Canada’s collection highlight, Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolf (1770), by replacing the English with vanquished followers of the Lakota-Teton Sioux Chief Big Foot surrounding their fallen leader. Logan also substitutes the token Indigenous man in West’s canvas with a settler military officer in the same pose of reverent mourning. By subverting the 1759 Quebec battlefield scene, the artist sheds light upon an overlooked moment in North American colonial history, the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.
In A Re-Thinking on the Western Front, Jim Logan reimagines Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel fresco, The Creation of Adam, as one pervaded by Indigenous narrative. Part of the Cree/ Sioux-Metis artist’s The Classical Aboriginal Series, where Western masterpieces are appropriated to challenge the canon’s racial and gendered hierarchy, this monumental portrayal re-conceives the Eurocentric biblical figures of Adam and God as an Indigenous man and matriarchal Creator. Surrounded by Her sacred clan, the Creator is enthralled by the Raven/Thunderbird. She assertively gestures towards the man, who’s hand gently extends to meet Hers as he reclines upon the back of Turtle Island. The image is further destabilized with the artist’s critique of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the upper left corner of the canvas. The illustration of human evolutionary stages is put into question through the artist’s hand-written annotations. By bringing together contrasting notions of human existence, reframed through an Indigenous lens, Logan powerfully confronts dominant ideologies. PHOTOS: Archbould Photography
