Art by John McDonald
"Requiem"- photography exhibition 2015
They were known as “Indian Affairs Coffins”- the only caskets provided by the Department of Indian Affairs when an Indigenous person died. They were quickly made, plain, and cheap.
By the age of 13, John McDonald had witnessed the burials of his father, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, and many other members of his family and community laid to rest in these particular caskets. The image of this particular type of casket planted deep within John both seeds of uneasiness, but also a creative idea- one that took nearly 20 years to come to fruition. In this series of photographs, John has taken this “Indian Affairs Coffin” out of the realm of the macabre, and has avoided the superstitions and emotional attachments applied to an inanimate object in order to create an artistic expression of the object in and of itself, outside of its normal surroundings. This exhibition was part of the “Requiem” performance art installation, first performed during the Indigenous Peoples Artists Collective’s annual Two-Story Café in 2015 (Special thanks to Drew Gray and Gray’s Funeral Chapel for the donation of the casket.) |