Curated by Arin Fay
Edited by Nic Wilson
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$32.95/160 pp.
Many years have passed since I first saw an exhibition of still-life paintings by the Governor General’s Award-winning Métis artist David Garneau. But the memory of that small pop-up show still casts a spell over me. His images of rocks suspended on strings felt like Zen koans: puzzles without answers, only mysteries to ponder.
Now, with the publication of Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau—in which 17 diverse writers, critics and curators respond to Garneau’s recent series of still-life paintings—I finally have some answers, riddled, of course, with an ever-growing number of questions.
The first clue to understanding Garneau’s enigmatic artworks—composed of textless books, rocks and bones often precariously balanced and bound with clamps or strings—is the title. Both the book and Garneau’s still-life series echo Justice Murray Sinclair’s assertion that residential schools were among the darkest chapters in Canadian history.
As the book unfolds, a kaleidoscope of meanings begins to emerge. For Tahltan Nation artist and curator Peter Morin, Garneau’s stones are living beings—literally—like “painted breath.” Morin traces this response to his youth, sitting in a sweat lodge, watching the stones pulse with a red glow. “At the current age of 46, I now know that those rocks were actually painted by too many years of knowing the Universe’s secrets,” he writes in the chapter “Stone and Rock: I Have Failed You.”
Tarene Thomas, a writer from Enoch Cree Nation and the Northwest Coast, was inspired by the nameless books that recur throughout Garneau’s paintings. Her poem “Smudge Before Reading” questions academia and poses an unsolvable question: “What does it mean to study oneself in the white man’s house?” She concludes with a powerful affirmation: “And I know we will rise to fight / But for now, we’ll smudge before we read.”
The most searing essay is by Larissa Lai, the Richard Charles Lee chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. In “Allies (After Hsieh and Montano)” she confronts those, including myself, who claim allyship from positions of power. “Their goodness shouts louder than your pain,” she writes. Garneau mirrors those sentiments with wordless irony. His painting Ally Tear Reliquary depicts a box of tissues pompously displayed beneath a glass museum case.
“The life of the eye is anything but still,” writes Fred Wah, in “Spine,” another poem in the book. Indeed. Each of the contributions in this anthology unveil ever-deeper aspects of Garneau’s still-lifes—revealing them as not just deep and insightful works but among the masterpieces of Canadian art.
Agnieszka Matejko is an artist and writer in Edmonton.
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