André Michel, artist and ethnograph

Comming soon

André Michel, Between two worlds, exhibit’s comments 1992.

I was at the beginning of 1970 that André Michel started to stay with the Innuat of the North Shore. He was sculpting, drawing, painting and especially observing. At that time, I though that was taking one of us place, and that his work should have been an Innu’s one. For me, he was still a White who came to take advantage and to export our cultural assets.
Since then, I changed my mind. When I look at his painting, I can recognize us in a lively and passionate manner. Someone had to observe us because we cannot be our own mirror. This young boy, sitting on a ski-doo during summer, I saw him a hundred times but I never notice him because he was so familiar to me.

Those of my generation are like me, bears born in a cage from a captive mother, first litter to be born on the “reserve” with for only legacy our instinct and the words transmitted by elders. André Michel knew how to seize our state of mind. His painting are denunciation, a cri du cœur, the echo of the bear’s confusion of the year 2000.

It is a reality that we should dare to show. I encourage his way to question mankind in his relation with the earth. I am grateful to him for valorizing the Innu culture through his work and to free it from the cages that are the reserves of the North Shore, of the Province of Québec and of America.

(Tashineskuamitin, Florent Volant, Kashtin, 1992)

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