Lot #50
Tim Schouten Winnipeg, Manitoba Pay list – Treaty 4 (Boy Born), 2012 Oil, dry pigment, beeswax, microcrystalline wax, dammar resin on canvas 9 x 12 inches Range: $450 – 600
Tim Schouten has been engaged in The Treaty Suites project for over ten years. This body of work examines the eleven “numbered treaties” which were signed between the Government of Canada and First Nations in Central Canada between 1871 and 1956. Schouten's perspective is that of a non-Aboriginal treaty participant descended from Scottish, Belgian, and Dutch settlers in the Red River region of Manitoba. Most of the paintings in this project are based on photographs that Schouten has taken at the exact physical locations of the signings of each of the eleven treaties. This particular work however, Pay list – Treaty 4 (Boy Born), is one of six small text paintings that were made after Schouten discovered a copy of an early hand-written “annuity pay list” for the Fort Qu’Appelle Band of Indians who for some reason had received Treaty Annuity payments at Fort Walsh that particular year. The list included notations on the number of people in each family receiving payment, and changes in the family since payments were made the previous year. In this family, it was noted that there had been a “boy born” during the previous year and thus the family would receive an additional $5 for the new member. The works in this series reflect on the ways in which the treaty making process, the written treaty itself and related documents, created the reserve (reservation) system that we know today. The work asks us to look at the ways in which the treaty process has defined land divisions, ownership rights and set the terms which have led to all of the social and economic inequities that we are all too familiar with today.
Schouten’s process in creating this work involved scanning, enlarging and cropping the original document, and then making a stencil of words, including all of the ink smears and splotches from the quill pen used to record the annuity. The canvas was then painted with varied pigmented wax layers up to a thickness of about oneeighth inch. Using a stencil, the words are then transferred to the wax, the lettering carved out with a sharp tool, the excavation filled with molten-pigmented wax. Once cooled, the surface worked with scraping tools and irons to achieve the finished effect. A Canadian artist based in Winnipeg, he studied at Art Sake Inc. in Toronto from 1978-1980. He is also a curator, writer, and art educator. He has exhibited his work across Canada and in the United States, and his paintings reside in private and public art collections including the collections of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, North Dakota Museum of Art and Cankdeska Cikana Community College in Fort Totten on the Spirit Lake Reservation. Schouten was one of six artists commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art to work with the people of North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation to create a body of artwork about contemporary life on the Reservation. An exhibition from the first year was shown at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space in New York’s prestigious Chelsea Art District in June 2013, followed by shows at Fort Totten on Spirit Lake, and finally the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. Prior to this collaboration, Schouten received a $20,000 commission from the Museum to begin painting on Spirit Lake (funded 43 by the National Endowment for the Arts).