Dempsey Bob Wood Carvings At Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts

Tahltan-Tlingit artist Dempsey Bob (b. 1948, Telegraph Creek, BC) has a story about frogs handed down from his grandfather. He shared it during a talk previewing an exhibition of his work, “Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob,” when it was on view at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in suburban Toronto.

The story begins with a village, and the residents of that village failing to keep it clean.

“Frogs came around the village and started talking all night–talking, talking–people wouldn’t listen,” Bob said.

Unable to sleep for the racket, the villagers sent a spiritual man to talk to the frogs.

“A long time ago our people used to be able to talk to the animals,” Bob reminds.

The frogs’ message was simple.

“You’ve dirtied your village, now you’ve dirtied our village,” Bob explained to the audience. “You’ve got to clean up your village because whatever you do in your village effects our village.”

The man returned and repeated what the frogs said. Still, the villagers didn’t listen. They wouldn’t clean up.

“More and more and more frogs came. They couldn’t sleep for days and days,” Bob said. “Finally, they gave up and cleaned up everything, cleaned up the village, cleaned up the water.”

The man returned to talk to the frogs. They were pleased, but told the man they’d be keeping an eye on the village.

“We’re going to talk just a little bit before dark to remind you people to keep clean,” Bob said finishing his story. “That story is about pollution.”

When you hear the frogs talking at night, they are reminding us to keep our village clean. It’s a message the world has mostly tuned out, our TVs and air conditioners and airplanes and white noise makers drowning out the natural world and the messages its trying to send us.

Bob carves frogs because their populations are collapsing around the world due to pollution and development. Frogs are also a part of his clan system.

Bob’s Frog Stories (2017) mask can be seen now through September 10, 2023 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the same show that was previously at the McMichael for which he gave the talk. It is the first full-career retrospective for Bob, bringing together some 60 works by this artist at the forefront of a centuries-old tradition of wood-carving on Canada’s Northwest Coast.

Refusing Nostalgia

Bob started carving by making his own toys as a kid. When he was born, Canada’s Indian Act outlawed First Nations artists from carving totem poles. The Act was an attempt at cultural genocide–if not literal genocide–and prohibited the nation’s Indigenous people from partaking in a vast array of spiritual and cultural customs including festivals, dances, powwows and ceremonies.

Among the ceremonies outlawed was the potlach. This ceremony often featured the raising of totem poles. The potlach was banned by the Canadian government from 1884 until 1951.

Bob went on to study with legendary Haida artist Freda Diesing (1925-2002). She was one of the few women to carve totem poles and among the first generation to reengage with the practice after the ban was lifted.

While Bob credits her tremendously for his artistic development, his carvings depart from the traditional in numerous ways. Most noticeable are his surfaces.

“Dempsey works his surfaces to such an extent that they look malleable, like butter,” Iris Amizlev, Curator–Community Engagement and Projects at the MMFA, and curator of the Montreal presentation of “Wolves,” told Forbes.com.

The rounded, swooping, sweeping curves and lines of his carvings recall luxury cars from the 1920s and 30s. Sensuous feels like a ridiculous word when describing wood-carving, but none other better applies in this case.

Secondarily, Bob plays with alignment.

“His work underwent a dramatic evolution in 2008 with the execution of his first asymmetrical piece, which triggered his experimentation with more complex compositions featuring torqued forms and figures facing various directions,” Amizlev explains. “This innovation challenged the frontal and symmetrical convention characteristic of the masks of Northwest Coast art. Dempsey calls these constructions his ‘wall sculptures;’ adding multiple views gives the figures an animate and dynamic quality, yet at the same time they appear frozen, as if captured in the midst of transformation.”

Unconventional materials such as bronze and mirrors are incorporated into his works which use traditional Alder and red and yellow cedar as the foundation. Visitors looking close will also see abalone shell and copper, operculum shell, sea lion whiskers, ermine skin and fur, black bear fur, human hair, moose hide, leather, horsehair, acrylic paint, bronze and synthetic fiber incorporated into the masks, panels, wall sculptures, vessels and regalia on display in objects created from the 1970s through today.

The regalia pieces–a heavy robe, a blanket and a chief’s robe–stem from a collaboration with his sister, Linda Bob, a union of respective, complementary practices. He works on the design, she does the sewing.

Also on view are Bob’s work in bronze casting, goldsmithing, printmaking and vestment production.

All backgrounded by his culture and the oral histories, songs and dances he was exposed to growing up, but never beholden to the old ways. At once traditionalist and avant-garde, Bob acknowledges the lineage to which he is indebted without indulging in nostalgia.

Notes of European sculpture and South Pacific art flavor his work.

“Our art has to evolve otherwise it will die,” Bob’s artist statement reads.

Origins

The exhibition takes its name from Bob’s clan; he is Wolf Clan through matrilineal descent.

“He wanted to pay tribute to the women in his family: his grandmother, great aunt, and mother–those who told him the stories and who believed in him,” Amizlev said.

While “Wolves” honors the influential women in Bob’s life, it also honors the place he comes from, the place his art comes from, Prince Rupert, BC where he grew up since age of 10, and Terrace, BC where he’s spent the last 16 years.

“Wherever you live effects the way you are, the way you see,” Bob said during the McMichael talk. “I live there because I’m close to the nature, close to the animals. I’m inspired there, and I’m inspired by our culture and our people and the land. I see the eagles. I see the ravens. We fish there.”

A pair of photographs taken near Terrace, reproduced and blown-up floor-to-ceiling, cover two walls of the exhibition, providing visitors a sense of the land and environment from which the work emanates.

After closing in Montreal, “Wolves” has one more stop at the Kelowna Art Gallery in Kelowna, BC from October 14, 2023, through February 18, 2024.