Acclaimed carver will get first profession retrospective at Glenbow Museum

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John Mackie
Postmedia

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It took some time for Dempsey Bob to get his first main retrospective present. However the 74-year-old makes up for misplaced time with Wolves, The Artwork of Dempsey Bob, an exhibition on the Glenbow Museum working Sept. 10 by means of Nov. 20.

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The exhibit options 109 items from private and non-private collections, tracing his progress from a younger carver from the Tahltan and Tlingit First Nations studying his conventional craft to the grasp carver of right this moment.

Bob’s forte is impossibly elegant masks, headdresses and sculptures that take conventional northwest coast artwork varieties and topics – corresponding to wolves, frogs, ravens, bears, salmon and killer whales – into the realm of recent fantastic artwork.

“This one man requested me if I nonetheless use stone instruments. And I advised him ‘You understand, I got here right here on a jet, I didn’t are available in a canoe,’” he stated from his house in Terrace.

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“We stay right this moment. Each artwork has to evolve, ultimately. The best way I strategy my work (is), the place would our folks have gone with the artwork in the event that they didn’t cease us, by means of the residential faculties and all that stuff? “There’s nowhere else to go. You’ll be able to’t return, you already know what I imply?”

So that you get a bit like Wolf Chief’s Hat (1993), a hanging carving of a stylized wolf head with sleepy eyes, massive pink lips, ultra-white enamel and large fangs executed in pink cedar, acrylic paint, operculum shell, horsehair, leather-based and ermine. Or Raven Panel (1989), a vibrant painted cedar carving that was completed after the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska.

“The black on the underside is the water, the oil on the water, and that’s why the salmon is black,” he explains. “Then I did the raven, dropping the salmon eggs within the water. We imagine that the raven got here and dropped the eggs in our headwater rivers and creeks, and that’s how we acquired the salmon. I believed, the raven’s going to have to come back once more.”

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The fashionable twist on the work is that it comes with a mirror.

“We are saying there’s a spirit facet, and the mirror represented that to me,” he relates. “It reveals the opposite facet, reveals the opposite half of actuality, that’s what it represents to me.

“This one German man stated to me ‘Hey, that’s not conventional, that mirror is just not conventional.’ And I advised him, ‘If the world lasts one other 100 years, that’s going to be a standard mirror. You’re not going to be right here, and I’m not going to be right here, we’ll have already purchased it.’”

Dempsey was born into an inventive household in Telegraph Creek, on the Stikine River within the northwest nook of B.C. His mom was from the Wolf clan, which suggests within the matriarchal lineage of his First Nation he’s a Wolf as effectively, therefore the title of the exhibition.

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“I used to be born in the proper household, as a result of my grandmother’s father was a carver from Alaska,” he stated. “I didn’t know him, he died a very long time in the past, however I knew him from my great-aunt’s tales. My mom was a seamstress, she made regalia, beadwork, all that.”

However his pure creative expertise didn’t appear to impress an artwork instructor in highschool, who gave him a C-minus. “I didn’t draw the way in which she wished me to attract,” he says with a chuckle.

He labored all types of jobs earlier than he grew to become a full-time artist in 1974.

“I labored within the cannery and I labored within the fish plant, I labored within the pulp mill and the sawmill, did every little thing,” he stated. “Labored on the pipeline. I did every kind of stuff, simply to outlive. You’ve acquired to outlive. After I began (doing artwork) I did a variety of educating, as a result of that’s the one manner I may get some earnings within the winter, when there was nobody to promote to.”

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He had the nice fortune to review carving with Freda Diesing in Prince Rupert within the mid-Nineteen Seventies. His massive business break was in 1989 when American collector George Gund purchased his complete 32-work present on the Grace Gallery in Vancouver. West Van collector Eric Savics purchased one other full present in 1993.

In a manner, his business success could also be one of many causes he’s by no means had a retrospective, regardless that his work is in lots of massive establishments, such because the Nationwide Gallery in Ottawa.

“What occurred is most of my items are in non-public collections, in collectors’ homes, so no one acquired to see them,” he stated. “That is the primary time persons are actually going to see what I’ve completed.”

Many artists by no means get an opportunity for a retrospective like Wolves, which is able to cross Canada to the McMichael Gallery in Ontario, the Montreal Museum of High quality Arts and the Kelowna Artwork Gallery over the subsequent couple of years.

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He discovered it “form of intimidating” to reunite with all his work, many years after he’d seen most of it.

“This one little masks was taking a look at me, ‘The place the hell you been, dad?’” he says with fun. ” ‘It’s been 40 years! I haven’t seen you for 40 years!’

“There was 70 items within the room once I (first) went in, and I may really feel them. As a result of I do know each line, I carved it. I drew it first, carved it, sanded it, then I completed it and painted it, so no one is aware of them like me. However now they give the impression of being completely different, they form of modified, they acquired their very own character, their very own feeling. It’s highly effective while you get all of them collectively.”

His artwork has been a lifelong studying curve.

“As a pupil (I believed) in two years I’ll be Dempsey Bob, and holy s–t, it took me 50!” he says with one other snigger. “And I’m nonetheless making an attempt to be Dempsey Bob. I’m making an attempt to get higher. Individuals don’t understand how lengthy it takes, you already know?”

jmackie@postmedia.com