M’CHIGEENG—Aamiwnaang First Nation Artist Nico Williams held his first exhibition, ‘Spirit Transformation’ at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation (OCF) in 2017 and this year, his ‘Home Slice’ exhibition comes full circle, albeit now as a multi-award-winning artist instead of a recent art school graduate.
Although he originally hails from an Anishinaabe reserve near Sarnia, Mr. Williams currently lives and works in Montreal. He graduated with a master’s in fine art from Concordia University and is now a veteran of numerous exhibitions—including the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal in 2021 and the PHI Foundation and Armoury shows in New York in 2023. Among his awards and distinctions are the prestigious Bronfman Fellowship for Contemporary Art and being shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2022. His works are now to be found in numerous major public and private collections.
The new exhibition at the OCF is called ‘Home Slice’ and it “interweaves snippets of hazy memory and striking realism to explore the world of the pawnshop, a repository for anecdotes and rumours where hundreds of disparate objects stand side by side, vacillating between reality and fiction.”
When first entering the OCF a visitor’s eye is first struck by a series of immense vamps hanging in the atrium as you enter the building. Incorporating jingles, these huge works are meant to be hung outdoors and provide a robust introduction to the artist.
But ‘Home Slice’ is more characterised by many objects that could normally be spotted laying on the shelves of a pawn shop—with a notable exception, these objects are rendered in intricately beaded form.
The artist notes that the concept for the art series was inspired by a childhood incident from the artist’s past, when a family member borrowed and then pawned one of Mr. William’s favourite video games. The game has since been lost irretrievably, but the inspiration lives on.
Mr. William’s works are deeply influenced by popular culture and 1990s esthetics, but come intertwined with a traditional twist.
Curatorial intern Shaelynn Recollet notes that Mr. Williams “seeks to highlight certain cultural convergences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices through the representation of familiar objects from that period.”
The beadwork incorporated in the works takes an ancestral technique, reworks it and updates that technique to combine tradition and modernity—thereby becoming a vehicle for reflection and exchange between nations.
“We are very honoured to be able to host Nico William’s exhibition,” said Ms. Recollet. She noted that ‘Home Slice’ is a work in progress, as the artist is continually adding pieces to the collection.
Anyone who has attempted to bead even a simple project will understand the detail and work that is involved in rendering a video game cover into a bead worked object.
The OCF exhibit will run until January 2025, but since the work is ongoing, it would be worthwhile to stop in occasionally in the interim to see what new has transpired.
