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Hildebrand Fellow Madeleine Morris Follows the Scent of Artist Joyce Wieland’s Canadian Nationalist Perfume
Madeleine Morris is a second-year PhD student in the History of Art Department. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Italian from Vassar College and an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Art, NYU. Her research focuses on twentieth century North America, modernisms, and olfactory art. She received a Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship in Summer 2023 to study Canadian nationalist artist Joyce Wieland’s landmark exhibition True Patriot Love with an emphasis on her olfactory artwork Sweet Beaver.
Joyce Wieland was a groundbreaking Canadian multimedia artist active in the 1960s and ’70s. The Hildebrand Fellowship helped me make significant strides in understanding Wieland and her Canadian nationalism through access to archives, artworks, and in location context. I was particularly interested in Wieland’s only olfactory artwork, a homemade perfume titled Sweet Beaver. I had previously undertaken several unsuccessful projects to find visual evidence of the artwork’s existence, and its importance to the artist. The Hildebrand Fellowship allowed me to visit Canadian art institutions, where I found more documentation than I had hoped for. I travelled to several different archives and museums to access non-digitized records that offered details about this understudied and powerful artwork.
Through my evolving research on North American olfactory art, aesthetics, and modernism, Wieland’s perfume stands out as a potent intervention in the museum space. She used it to change the tone and environment of her landmark 1971 exhibition True Patriot Love, the first ever solo show of a living female Canadian artist at the National Gallery of Canada. The work and the exhibition together form a unique and potent collision of nationalism and olfactory aesthetics. Sources in publication and online were scant. But at the National Gallery’s archives in Ottawa, I was granted access to numerous boxes on this exhibition. The documents provided information I had not encountered about other sensory elements in the exhibition, including a pond with live ducks; the details of the Arctic Passion Cake, a cake she commissioned that sat in the exhibition to droop and melt over time; and archival images of her interacting with the work, attending the show opening, and interviews about her process. Stationary emblazoned with “Sweet Beaver” and photographs from press clippings demonstrated the importance of this olfactory artwork to the artist and its impact on the public experience of True Patriot Love.
The Hildebrand Fellowship also gave me access to another rich trove of archival materials at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. In this archive I discovered the rare exhibition book for True Patriot Love (an artwork in itself) and found documents about the continued existence of Sweet Beaver and its whereabouts up to 2003, as well as some of the art collections it entered.
At the AGO, I was able to delve more deeply into unpacking Wieland’s Canadian nationalism, and the inspiration she took from noted landscape painter and father of the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson. Wieland’s obsession with Thomson, as evidenced by her drawings and photographs of him in the True Patriot Love book and his role in her film The Far Shore, came more clearly into light when I saw the extensive collection of his paintings at both the AGO and National Gallery. His small yet muscular sketches, searching lines, and carefully observed landscapes captured a vision of the Canada that captivated the nation, Wieland, and me.
I found more of his paintings and those of his contemporaries at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. This museum offered more of Thomson’s works. It also contained works by the Beaver Hall Group, the Quebecois answer to Ontario’s Group of Seven, providing more insight into the art historical landscape across the English-French divide. Examining this aspect of Canadian culture helped shed light on Wieland’s efforts to grapple with Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s nationalist unifying endeavor. This permitted expanded opportunities for visual analysis of Thomson’s artworks and connections to Wieland’s reinterpretation of the Canadian landscape. Both artists’ ecocritical depictions of landscape stake quiet claims for preservation of Canadian wilderness, even as Thomson’s body of work helped spark interest in expanding development further North to tap into the potential of the available, “untouched” North (a fallacy that excludes Indigenous populations and prioritizes human industry above all other land uses). At these art institutions, I also encountered several Wieland artworks and films I had not been able to view previously, including Rat Life and Diet in North America, a pivotal film in her oeuvre, and Confedspread, a multimedia collage work whose plastic textures and hidden Canadian flags do not read as easily in reproduction. |
Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 