Indigenous artist building on community and connections

By Irene van der Kloet

Dawn Marie Marchand, a well-known indigenous artist from Cold Lake, has only been in Smoky Lake for several years and has been an artist for over 30 years. She recently moved to a different location in town. Her new site on West Railway Drive features a large yard with plenty of opportunities for displaying artifacts and hosting art shows. “When it finally melted enough to start working in the yard, we started cutting things back and found this beautiful space. I’ve been adding little things to it”, Dawn Marie says while she shows off a cozy corner in her yard with artifacts from days gone by. “In the future, I’d like to have a pop-up farmers’ market-style little thing with artists in the yard.” She is creating a medicine garden in one corner with white sage, tobacco and sweetgrass, a mini cider, and a buffalo skull in the centre. She uses a part of the house as studio space until the garage is opened. Much work still needs to be done there, like some repairs and maintenance and only then is she planning to open. Once she is open, the front room will be the gallery. The house will be available for people to walk through as she wants to display indigenous art. Most of the art in the house is painted by herself, but she also has art from other well-known indigenous artists, a hat collection, and a collection of indigenous jewellery on display. Central in all her art and displays is the history of the indigenous people, something she wants people to get a better understanding of, especially the disconnect between the intent of indigenous oral history and the interpretation of colonial history. She advertises her artwork almost exclusively online through social media and her website. Initially, she did not intend to become an artist. “My mother wanted me to be a lawyer,” she says, “but I needed to go to Keyano College to upgrade. It allowed me to take a handful of university classes, and one of those classes was fine arts credits. So, I took art history, which was all memorization of mostly European art. But it was too much, and I asked to take a different class; that is how I ended up in arts. Huge names in indigenous arts would come to the studio, and we would be fully immersed with well-known indigenous artists. That defined the rest of my life”. She works with different materials and “breaks the rules” when mixing certain paints or materials. One day, she was painting on wooden panels when she wondered why she was covering up the beautiful wood. Now she gears her art to what is naturally occurring, where you can see the wood grain in the painting. Currently, some of her art is exhibited at Enbridge Place, which brings her to say that artists die of exposure, meaning that exposure does not pay her bills; only a sale of a work of art does.

“Artists can not be expected to do exhibitions for free; we also have bills to pay. Unfortunately, some artists at the ‘make it or break it’ point take a deal.” She is recovering from a car accident and planning to open her art gallery and attract artists next year. In the meantime, she is building relationships with indigenous artists and the community. Dawn Marie can be found on Facebook and her website httsp://www.dawnmariemarchand.net.