Carl Beam: Pieces of a Puzzle
Sally Frater
Moving across genres including sculpture, painting, ceramics, printmaking, installation, and assemblage, Manitoulin Island-based multimedia artist Carl Beam created an extremely potent and influential body of work. Formally and conceptually proficient, he produced works that probed the interstices of world history, politics, science, and materiality, as well as Indigeneity. This exhibition, which draws on holdings from the Art Gallery of Guelph’s permanent collection, focuses on prints and paintings by Beam that illustrate not only his skill in both, but how his capacity for composition was able to confound and elucidate our ability to make meaning.
Image detail: Carl Beam, Sitting Bull and Whale (detail), 1990, photo-etching, 121.9 x 78.7 cm. Gift of Marion Oxley, 2006, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph
Organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council.
About the artist
Carl Beam
Carl Beam (1943 – 2005) was born at M’Chigeeng First Nation (West Bay) on Manitoulin Island. As it was mandatory for every Indigenous child to attend a residential school, at ten years old he was sent to the Garnier Residential School in Spanish, Ontario, for eight years, an experience that would inform much of his later work. He began formal studies at the Kootenay School of Art in 1971 and transferred to the University of Victoria in 1973 where he attained his BFA, ultimately receiving his MFA at the University of Alberta in 1976. Drawing on elements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Beam would use collage, painting, and printing practices to layer visual references to varied subjects and histories, connecting Indigenous worldviews to wide-ranging cultural, historical, and political issues and ideas. Carl Beam’s artwork has been featured in many groundbreaking exhibitions, including the National Gallery of Canada’s 1992 Indigena: Perspectives of Indigenous Peoples on Five Hundred Years and a major touring retrospective of his work in 2010-11. He was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 2000, and received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2005.
View More Exhibitions
exhibition
September 21.2023 / December 30.2023
This group exhibition that explores various rituals related to the everyday and the natural environment through art by those who hold cultural ties to the Caribbean.
exhibition
September 14.2023 / December 17.2023
Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea presents landscapes by Canadian artist Takao Tanabe from AGG’s permanent collection.
exhibition
September 14.2023 / December 17.2023
The Third Scenario examines the act of art making through hyphenated conditions and what it means to create while being Asian and living in Canada.
exhibition
July 14.2023 / September 3.2023
This exhibition highlights Grande’s distinct visual lexicon culled from her experiences as well as cultural sources – symbolic references that coalesce in surreal, painterly compositions.
exhibition
May 25.2023 / September 10.2023
Incorporating elements of local lore as well as the evolving built landscape, Norlen’s large-scale drawings explore the effects of time and the play of memory and imagination that results.
exhibition
May 19.2023 / July 9.2023
Chelsea Ryan combines diaristic practices with digital technologies to record the still, transient, and enduring moments she notices of everyday life.
exhibition
May 19.2023 / September 3.2023
The constructions of José Luis Torres evoke the prolonged ambiguity and estrangement inherent in experiences of immigration and exile.
exhibition
January 19.2023 / April 30.2023
Connecting aspects of Indigenous cosmology to wider cultural meanings, this exhibition speaks to the idea of seeing through space.