Perhaps the most lasting image of Joyce Wieland: Heart On, the spring-summer exhibition co-curated and hosted by Montreal’s Musée des beaux-arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), is that of four knit flags, entitled Flag Arrangement, from 1970–71. The exhibition – the largest ever devoted to the seemingly inexhaustible painter/filmmaker/sculptor/textile artist – collects a diverse body of work sourced from Canadian institutions. It also negotiates, at a time when such questions have gained new political urgency, the idea of Canadian patriotism. Wieland wanted to resist the dominance of American culture over Canadians, and yet her form of nationalism necessitated looking at, and never away from, the problems inherent to the Canadian project. The 11-pointed maple leaves of Flag Arrangement – playfully stretched, squeezed, and contorted to fit their frames – are emblematic of Wieland’s sense of Canadian identity: personal, pliable, and above all else, durable. Depending on one’s background, Wieland is best known either as a filmmaker, a painter, or a textile artist. Following a timeline illustrated with images demonstrating her journey toward acceptance as one of Canada’s preeminent female artists, Heart On begins in earnest with a tour through Wieland’s earliest paintings. With works on loan from private collectors and institutions across the country – the National Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Queens University, and Concordia University – this room introduces attendees to an artist concerned from the outset with exploding the boundaries meant to contain her. In War Memories (1960), the Blues series (1960–61), and The Kiss (1961), Wieland negotiates the influence of Spanish modernist Joan Miró with thick splashes of colour taking the form of miniature islands on murky monochrome canvases. She does not so much suffer from the anxiety of influence as she seeks it out actively. In an interview, Wieland recalled that she had made “a conscious decision to be influenced by someone other than the milieu that I was associated with, [most of whom] were men.” Seeing beyond the harshly delimited horizons of the contemporary Toronto scene, she borrowed from a number of influences in pursuit of a greater freedom, which was nonetheless her own. But even as her appetites crossed the Atlantic, she remained concerned with Canada, first and foremost. Laura Secord Saves Upper Canada (1961) tells the story of the Canadian heroine in a spiral oil composition replete with cloth, paper, and chalk assemblages. Wieland learned this popular bit of Canadian history in grade school: In 1813, Laura Secord walked across 30 kilometres of enemy territory to warn the British of an upcoming American attack in the Niagara region, greatly aiding the pre-Canadian cause in the Battle of Beaver Dams. As curator and art scholar Shannon Stride recounts in the catalogue essay devoted to this piece, Wieland was attracted to the tale, a rare piece of Canadian history that foregrounded a woman’s story. The work preserves this childhood enthusiasm alongside Wieland’s playfully deconstructivist instincts: a pasted-on paper airplane introduces the conceit of a bird’s eye view, while crude chalk sketches butt up against flags and words that swirl together. In the carefully curated chaos, Canadian history and identity are rendered complex, multivalent, and inextricable from Wieland’s own sense of expression. If these early works reflect an artist interested in the limits imposed on her self-expression, the subsequent room explodes these boundaries altogether. Wieland first became acquainted with filmmaking in the 1950s as a painter of animation cels for Toronto’s Graphic Associates Film Production Ltd., Canada’s first private animation studio, where she met her future husband, the experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. When the couple moved to New York City in …
