[Fall 2025]
Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me
by Sophie Guignard
Galerie d’art d’Ottawa
19.10.2024 — 16.03.2025
[EXCERPT]
The exhibition Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me: Jeff Thomas Origin surveyed forty years of images by Jeff Thomas, a member of the Onondaga Nation. Following a car accident in 1979, which left him with a permanent physical disability, Thomas devoted himself full time to photography, which became the tool for his identity-related, historical, and political research. Defining himself as an urban Iroquois, Thomas set out to document the presences – and absences – of Indigenous people in cities and their peripheries.
In fall 2022, when Thomas was hospitalized and then had to move to wheelchair-accessible housing, the Ottawa Art Gallery acquired his archives and a collection of framed artworks from his home. Since then, he has recovered and produced new works, including Dream Panels, which formed the conceptual background for the exhibition. Twenty of the panels were hung on the gallery’s walls, like a red thread connecting aspects of his reflective and critical approach. For many years, he has created assemblages of images that engage in a fictional conversation between his own photographic archives and historical representations, proposing new configurations of meaning and creating what he calls post-reserve histories. These panels, based on the idea of the dream – or vision – as a possibility for healing and dialogue, are related to wampum belts, which he likens to photographs, as both constitute modes of transmission of personal and collective memory.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Stories My Father Couldn’t Tell Me]
Sophie Guignard holds a doctorate in art history, with a specialty in photography studies, from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her dissertation focused on the collective movement for Indigenous self-representation in the catalogues and brochures that have accompanied exhibitions by Indigenous photographers in North America since the 1980s. She also holds master’s degrees in cultural policies and in political science from Université Paris-Cité.