Carl Beam
Beam died on July 30, 2005, in his home on M'chigeeng Reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario from complications due to diabetes.
While at the University of Alberta, Beam wanted to write on Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), a contemporary Indigenous artist, but his professors deemed it an unworthy topic.
"In developing his work over the years, Beam has been accompanied by his wife, Ann, herself an artist and a former teacher at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
"He disregarded the illusory deep space of Renaissance depiction, in favour of a flat tableau, where a dialogue of multiple images could take place".
[5] At this time his photographic imagery was achieved primarily via screen process, photo-etching, Polaroid instant prints, and a solvent transfer technique also used by Robert Rauschenberg.
"We developed a dialogue together in everyday living, politics, world events, ceramic technique, painting, and all things art, that would continue for the next 26 years".
His Mimbres bowls were fabricated as a modern version of the ancient Anasazi ones - on the interior they were generally cream colored and quite smooth whereas the exterior appeared almost disregarded and less important (see Figures 1 and 2).
Also in the Anasazi tradition, Beam's bowls typically featured a bold design around the rim with his own unique images placed in the center.
"[3] Beam continued to work on and off in pottery, creating bowls, snake pots and other handmade creations almost always decorated with his designs and images.
His works also feature news events (such as the Anwar Sadat assassination) or self-portraits or the shaman figure and family, a theme often returned to (seen in Figure 1) Beam also shared the techniques learned and developed with others including his cousin David Migwans, now an accomplished artist living in M'Chigeeng First Nation, Manitoulin Island.
[8] Although he had achieved a level of success in the United States, with art dealers in both Taos, and Santa Fe, Beam returned to Canada, where he felt his work had an important contribution to make.
Living in the east end of Peterborough, Ontario, Beam created an early set of large format etchings, consisting of nine prints.
He utilized a heat transfer technique learned from fellow artist Ann Beam, with his work on paper and Plexiglas.
The works contained various juxtapositions of imagery from the spiritual, the natural, and political world, and incorporated his own poetic inscriptions and math equations.
Beam's imagery for the Columbus Project was cross-culturally vast, and contained the primary images of Columbus, and Native peoples, but also images of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Abraham Lincoln, Italian Christian iconography, diverse animal species, self-portraits and technology (stop lights, rockets).
There were two sculptural elements, Voyage a partial reconstruction of the Santa Maria, and the Ampulleta, a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) hourglass, with one obstructive stone within the sand, as well as several installations, and a video performance of Beam in the Dominican Republic, making a representational graveyard on the beaches where the landing could have taken place.
Murray wrote of the way Beam's imagery had become vast and all-inclusive: "Compared to earlier work, The Whale of Our Being exhibits a positively baroque complexity, a dizzying assortment of references, sometimes printed in overly saturated, fluorescent colour.
"[7]Allan J. Ryan said of this period of Beam's work, "He re-examines the media construction of violence and infamy and the public fascination with celebrity".
The work included images of pop stars, gangsters, scientists, native leaders, politicians, writers and poets, musicians (Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Manson, Jerry Garcia, Britney Spears, John Lennon), TV personalities (Martha Stewart), animals, and birds.
"Technically Beam is regarded as an innovator for his intentional blurring of diverse art practices, thereby enabling certain methodologies and techniques to acquire new contexts.
"[3] "He evolved his own unique techniques as needed in photo-etching and photo based painting, to name a few, and his passionate discourse on all things political and practical inspired many people.
The exhibition, curated by Greg A. Hill, Audain Curator and Head of the Department of Indigenous Art, was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Ann Beam, Greg Hill, Gerald McMaster, Virginia Eichhorn, and Alan Corbiere with Crystal Migwans, including paintings, photo-based collage works, constructions, ceramics and videos.
