Dark Chapters Book launch

May 10, 2025, 2 p.m.
Book launch
Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau
University of Regina Press

May 10, 2025, 2 p.m.
Book launch
Dark Chapters: Reading the Still Lives of David Garneau
University of Regina Press

Dark Chapters brings together 63 full colour still life paintings with aesthetic/personal/political responses from some of Canada’s finest poets, artists, curators, and fiction writers (among them Fred Wah, Paul Seesequasis, Jesse Wente, Lillian Allen, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Larissa Lai, and Susan Musgrave). Garneau’s still life series “Dark Chapters” (a nod to the Reports of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which Justice Murray Sinclair describes the residential school system as “one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our nation’s history”) combine common objects (books, bones, teacups, mirrors) and less familiar ones (a Métis sash, a stone hammer, a braid of sweetgrass) to reflect the complexity of contemporary Indigenous experiences in a form of painting, the still life, which was historically considered one of the lowest forms of painting. David Garneau has written about how Indigenous art isn’t written about with critical care, often characterized as work to champion and/or make space for, and feels that some of the best writing in recent years on Indigenous art has been found in catalogues. These observations and a desire for depth in art discourse inspired him to devise a responsive form that allows engagement with his paintings on their own terms. This book features accessible, searching, and revelatory responses that touch on decolonization, allyship, representation, history, and how these ideas speak in art, in Garneau’s paintings, and in the responding artist’s engagement with their contemporaries and their time.

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