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Installation detail showing individual 'page' of beaded Indian Act
2002 11 08 Nadia Myre Indian Acts beading installation

Nadia Myre
Indian Acts
November 8 – December 1, 2002

Myre’s beautiful and laborious rendition of the infamous legal document known as the Indian Act – the federal legislation dealing with Indian status and establishing the reserve system – uses beads to represent the patterns of words and paragraphs. The work becomes symbolic of the overlay of meaning between different systems and directs us to notice both the associative beauty and the obvious gaps in the translation. The direct transference of words into beads is at once a close reading, an obfuscation, and a poetic exploration bridging image and text.

Nadia Myre is a visual artist from Quebec and an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg. Her multidisciplinary practice has been inspired by participant involvement as well as recurring themes of identity, language, longing and loss.

Myre is a graduate of Camosun College (1995), Emily Carr University of Art + Design (1997) and Concordia University (MFA, 2002), and a recipient of numerous grants and awards, notably: Pratt & Whitney Canada’s ‘Les Elles de l’art’ for the Conseil des Arts de Montréal (2011), Quebec Arts Council’s Prix à la creation artistique pour la region des Laurentides (2009), and a prestigious Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum (2003). Her work has received accolades from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Le Devoir, and has been featured in ARTnews, American Craft Magazine, Parachute, Canadian Art, C Magazine, and the German magazine Monopol. Collecting institutions include: MacKenzie Art Gallery, City of Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Bibliotèque et archives nationales du Québec, National Museum of the American Indian, and Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine in France. Works may be found on permanent display in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.