Nostalgia that grounds us, together, around the water in Anong Beam’s creation
Sometimes we look back with nostalgic eyes to summer days, to times when everyone was healthy, to the memories of our youth. To the things that made us who we are.
Anong Migwans Beam paints on Manitoulin Island. She grew up surrounded by art — her parents were both artists; her father, Carl Beam, the first Indigenous artist to have a painting purchased as a piece of contemporary art by the National Gallery in Ottawa — and by nature.
Those influences are reflected in her painting.
Over the past two years, she says, “looking at my life, and with my mother entering Alzheimer’s, I have been painting memories. My practice has always centred around water and how it holds and contains us, and is a silent witness again and again to all events, constantly renewed and present in us, as it was for our ancestors.”
She paints in large format — sweeping canvases that are best exhibited in a large space like the walls of Campbell House, she says in a video that launched the exhibition.
