Mohawk Warriors, Hunters & Chiefs: The Art of Tom Wilson tehohåhake

A worried man with a worried mind,
No one in front of me, and nothing behind
Bob Dylan, “Things Have Changed”

It’s just a matter of time before we get to shine. It’s not a question of when, or who does the crime
Tom Wilson, “Shine”

It’s easy to be cynical, if not fully indifferent, to the contemporary art world when, just last week, a banana duct-taped to the wall of a gallery fetched 6 million plus American dollars at Sotheby’s.

Hey, I am all for conceptual art if that is what said banana is, and, damn, wish I had come up with that banana trick. But also in the past week I took in Tom Wilson tehohåhake at TAP Centre for Creativity, a show of paintings, sculpture, installation — even decorated canoe paddles — that was at once sombre, ecstatic, serene, troublesome, disturbing and… profound beautiful eye candy. Works that make one think and wanna talk about. No bananas, in other words. And, if you are into the commodity side of things when it comes to art, you could purchase a whole lot of these pieces for way less than one-tenth the price of that banana.

Tom Wilson tehohåhake is on fire in this exhibition, and it’s various add-on he delivered an ecstatic reading and musical performance for the opening, which illuminated the backstory to the works. There’s a screening of the documentary film on Wilson’s story from 2023, Beautiful Scars. That doc is an off-shoot of his acclaimed eponymous memoir, available here along with an art imprint of his works, and a vinyl LP soundtrack. It’s a dynamic, multi-pronged exhibit/performance in other words, lovingly curated by Linda Ludke, collections librarian at the Central Branch, and Sandra De Salvo and her team at TAP Centre for Creativity.

I say Wilson is on fire not just because he’s such a busy creator at the age of 65. All of this work both written and visual is just an aside to his day job as one of Canada’s acclaimed singer/songwriters in his various iterations and personas, from his early days in the Florida Razors, to Junkhouse in the 90s, Lee Harvey Osmond and on to Blackie and the Rodeo Kings with Colin Linden and Stephen Fearing in the past few decades. But turning to the visual art side of his protean fire, one gets the idea that Wilson is a wild man, on fire on the inside, a psyche both cooking and raging.

To understand this phoenix of an artist that has arisen, one has to know a bit about his backstory. At the age of 53 while on a tour Wilson was informed by a stranger that her family knew his parents, and Wilson discovered a dark secret: he was a “scoop” kid, taken at birth and put up for adoption. The woman he knew as his cousin Janie was in fact his mother, Mohawk from the Kahnawake First Nations reserve near Montreal. In the subsequent years Wilson would unravel the whole story of his family and Indigenous heritage — and hence his Mohawk name, tehohåhake or, two roads.

“When I start thinking about this,” says Wilson, “my heart just goes black. I get really angry, and then I have to nurture myself out of that, pull all of that blackness out of my heart. Full-time job. This is colonialism, right? This is it. This is… not sure about knowing your identity, questioning yourself about your own being, about who you are. Questioning everybody around you. Not knowing my language, not knowing my culture, not knowing my colours. That’s the job of colonialism: to wipe the person out. And our blood memory never lets that happen.”

Wilson’s powerful installation Fading Memories of Home recreates in miniature what a residential school room — one attended by his birth mother Janie — might have been like, with actual vintage film footage from such a school projected on the chalk board. On the student desks are photographs of families who were taken in to the residential schools emblazoned onto the wooden desk tops, Those images begin to fade on the desktops as you walk through the installation . It’s a poignant way of representing what Wilson’s mother told him one day, that a nun told the class to look around at the other kids — take a good hard look around, because “these will be the last Indians you’ll ever see.”

“Everything I create now has got a purpose because of identity, which is almost like a lost coin for me. It took me 56 years to find out what it was running through me. I hope to become closer in harmony with my Mohawk culture. By honouring, by painting, by writing about the beauty of it.”

That this body of work — painting, sculpture and installation looks at first glance very informed by his roots and newly revealed identity, that isn’t quite the whole story. In many of these works Wilson fills out sections with starlike constellations that seems reminiscent of the beadwork in Mohawk craftwork — I happen to have a pair of baby moccasins that came from Kahnawake, and one might be tempted to make a stylistic equation. But elsewhere, a metal sculpture can bring to mind a Keith Haring form. In the paintings Seeds, and Midnight, Wilson presents a beadwork kind of pixelation, but one also gets a sense of, say, Friedensreich Hundertwasser”s use of popping colours and compositional structure.

But what is most telling is that Wilson was painting quite before any stylistic influence from his Mohawk roots were revealed:

“I started to paint around 1997. I immediately started to paint these simple shapes of an eye, a nose and a mouth. I wanted to create images that were easy to understand. My art is really… just one image that I have been shifting around and it’s beginning to evolve, getting more detailed. But as I continued to paint this face… it kept coming to me. My daughter said, ‘Dad, you’ve gotta stop painting these faces, this is cultural appropriation. And I said, ‘I’m a knucklehead from Hamilton, what the fuck is that?! She said, ‘cultural appropriation is when someone takes pieces of someone else’s culture and uses them for their own advancement, their own means.’ And I said, well this is just what I’m painting. I don’t know what this is. This is just what feels good.

I don’t have the ability to stop my will to create and my will to create for the last 25 years has been to paint these images that are obviously ‘indigenous.’”

And so not maybe everything is as it seems with Wilson’s images: are these in fact sui generis works? Or as Wilson describes it, images coming through “blood memory”? What seems most certain is that in a broader context, Wilson’s style is his own.

“Tom Wilson’s paintings and imagery are unmistakably Tom Wilson,” says Tom Beckett of Beckett Fine Art in Hamilton. “I’ve followed Tom’s painting for the past 20 years plus and as his work has evolved, I always know instantly it’s a Tom Wilson. This is a huge feat for any artist in this day and age and so damn rare! Picasso, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Norval Morrisseau and Tom Wilson to name a few. All instantly recognizable.

I feel this is the case because all of Tom’s paintings and imagery come from his heart and soul, dreams and imagination. It’s been an extraordinary ride working with Tom Wilson, as I’ve been a huge fan of his music since the early 1980’s, a fan of his art for the past 20 years and to see him develop as a visual has been so exciting. Tom is the hardest working  and focused artist, musician, singer song writer I know. He’s got a big beautiful heart. His paintings are filled with emotion, magical detail and a consistent message.”

Indeed, emotion and magical detail are forefront in The Battleground. It’s monstrous, so you have to stand back to take it in. It’s captivating, it grabs you from a distance, and then when you pull in, informs on another level when you look at the detail up close. There’s a kind of shapeshifting. The way Wilson’s two roads go?

In his performance and reading at the gallery, Wilson spoke passionately, asking himself, “what is it like to be Mohawk? A complicated question to answer. 

“This creative path is one of the ways back for me. The book, the second book, the play are all instruments that I’m trying to create to make conversation happen in this country. I’m not gonna walk up to you and stick my finger in your chest and tell you anything. I’m gonna let art do the work. Art has power that nothing else has for us. Government? No. Churches? No. Corporations? No. We come to the altar of art to embrace us, to guide us.”

As he spoke, I couldn’t help but think of Wilson’s fellow Canadian troubadour Bruce Cockburn and his song from the 80s, “Stolen Land.” Cockburn asks,

So now we’ve all discovered the world wasn’t only made for whites
What step are you gonna take to try and set things right
In this stolen land

Stolen land by colonialists leads to stolen identities, stolen childhoods, stolen sense of place and purpose. At the time of that song (along with Cockburn’s warning on our apathy towards our rainforests, the lungs of the planet,

if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?) there wasn’t much of an audience listening.

But maybe, things have changed.

“So this art that I’ve created here is hopefully something that will create a conversation, that you’ll walk away and talk about,” says Wilson. “ And hopefully those conversations will turn into action.

We Indians, my mother, my ancestors have been overcoming hatred at the hands of colonialism for 600 years, so tell me, what is reconciliation supposed to look like, in this world now? It looks like this: It looks like me, right now, having an opportunity to talk with you, and later, giving you an opportunity to talk. For now, let’s create a world where we don’t need a word like reconciliation. Let us create a world where we don’t have to apologize to our grandchildren for the hard work that we didn’t do.”

It’s one Mohawk guys opinion but you don’t have to feel guilt. The lies of this country have been hidden forever from us, from every generation. Let’s just take the time as individuals to educate ourselves a little, to open up our hearts, delete our Twitter apps, turn of CNN, Fox News, even CBC news, and give ourselves an opportunity to think for ourselves. Give ourselves an opportunity to open up our hearts, to show patience and love and respect and gratitude every day. And that means, not fighting over a parking spot at the grocery store.”

Amen to that, brother Tom.

In the acknowledgments section of his memoir Beautiful Scars, Wilson tips his hat to Bob Dylan’s Things Have Changed, “a song that dragged the poet out of me and opened the doors of possibility.” And that poetry and possibility is in full display in this accomplished body of work.

“I have unchained all the prisoners from my basement and freed the ghosts from my attic,” Wilson concludes in the memoir.

“I was the guy who ended up holding the keys to their freedom.

It was me who let them out.

It’s a job that no one else could do and one that comes with great consequence because those ghosts and prisoners are standing around me now all day, all night long.”

Mohawk Warriors, Hunters & Chiefs: The Art of Tom Wilson tehohåhake at TAP Centre for Creativity until December 21, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpx46yPTtGE

Watch the documentary Beautiful Scars on TVO.org https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/beautiful-scars

For more on the art of Tom Wilson tehohåhake: https://www.beckettfineart.com/tom-wilson

Vincent Cherniak lives on stolen land in London, Ontario, on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Attawandaron and Huron-Wendat peoples, at the forks of Deshkan Ziibi (Antler River), an area subject to the Dish with One Spoon Wampum and other treaties.