Mohawk Warriors, Hunters & Chiefs
The contemporary art exhibition Mohawk Warriors, Hunters & Chiefs, The Art of Tom Wilson was launched at the Art Gallery of Burlington, in Burlington, Ontario, Canada from December 1, 2018 to January 27, 2019, and is available for touring through 2022.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition consists of 9 large-scale paintings, 6-12 painted guitars (depending upon available space), and an option to construct a ‘living room’ installation meant to evoke Tom’s childhood home, consisting of a video and monitor, vintage couch, lamp and wall panels, photographs of his Indigenous ancestors and other related ephemera.
The exhibition space requirements are flexible within a range of 1,500 – 2,500 sq. ft., and between 150 and 250 running feet of wall space.
In his recent autobiography Beautiful Scars, Tom Wilson talks about feeling unsettled from an early age; a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. He realizes now that this was due to the secrets of his unusual upbringing, yet his spirit has remained restless ever since. He is still driven to ask questions, to seek meaning from the elusive mysteries hidden beneath the surface of everyday existence, to come to terms with his history, his identity; to aspire to higher truths and to understand his place in the world.
His life has been an ongoing quest so it is perhaps inevitable that after decades spent immersed in poetry, literature and music that he would turn attention to visual art, a language that transcends the verbal and the written; a rich vocabulary of symbols, patterns and iconography used by his ancestors since ancient times to carry knowledge, information, wisdom, spirit and stories down through the generations and ages. Wilson sees the potential of images and pictures to open other avenues of expression and understanding.
Many of Wilson’s recent paintings are inscribed with text from Beautiful Scars, and here they take flight from the page. Not necessarily legible, the words and the stories come alive in a different way; they become integrated into a more complex and layered language.
The paintings are of heads and faces that resemble masks whose traditional form and function was to draw forth the inner spirit of the wearer. The face represents identity. The head is the locus of spirit and imagination. The images also resemble totem pole carvings that evoke and honour animal spirits and human kinship with nature. These paintings depict the hunters, warriors and chiefs; the ghosts, the spirits and the ancient ancestors.
The exaggerated eyes of the faces are a key motif for the artist. Symbolically – and literally – our eyes represent our perspective onto the world; the act of perception and awareness. Our eyes too are mirrors of the soul. They are our windows onto the world; they see out and reveal what’s within. The backgrounds in Tom’s paintings are deep, colourful and atmospheric, filled with images of suns, moons and stars, references to the celestial realm, to the universe that is our home and our shared existence.
Working as a professional musician since the age of 17, the guitar has been Wilson’s primary instrument of expression. It carries stories that connect him to a lineage of modern forms of expression: folk, jazz, country, rock, punk and roots music. No longer functional as instruments, the necks and bodies of the old guitars that he paints are inscribed with the scars and scratches of their own histories and stories. Painted in his characteristic style, their function and meaning are transformed into a new language where music, literature and visual art merge within the expansive imagination of his own creation.
This language, this art, these images, these paintings and guitars represent Tom’s quest, his journey, his aspiration to truth and understanding through the creative spirit. They connect him and viewers to the through-line that runs from ancient times, across Turtle Island, along the big river that runs down from Kahnawake to Lake Ontario and to the shores of Hamilton where he was born. They are bridges from the past, through to the present and into the future.