By Sandra Schulman
Childbirth and quantum physics, the study of the behavior of matter and energy at the most fundamental, subatomic level, have led artist Renée Condo to a remarkable new body of work.
Her new show at the Gavlak Gallery in West Palm Beach, Niskamij (Sky World), is a solo exhibition that evokes her Indigenous cosmology through large-scale beaded compositions that are layered with symbolic depth and energy that vibrates.
“It is new work I’ll be showing,” Condo, a Canadian artist of Mi’gmaq First Nation descent, said from her home base in Montreal. “I was asked to do a piece for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Ball. The space was 80 feet long by 20 feet long and 50 feet high, so it’s quite a grand space, but it was only a one-night show. I was thinking, ‘Ooh, this is a perfect opportunity for me to investigate new realms.’
“My area of interest is the sky lodge or the sky world,” she said. “At the same time, I was speaking with the Gavlak Gallery about having a solo show with them and I said it would be great if I could then turn it into a show that fits into a gallery.”
Condo had come to art later in life after working in a government job, then having a baby, then going back to school for her master’s degree.
“I returned back from Montreal to my community on a year’s maternity leave and got into the arts, which I was interested in, but not knowing at the time that it was linked to consciousness or cosmology. I wasn’t raised in a traditional manner on a reservation, but those things are passed down anyway in us, there’s certain ways of being and doing and acting. I was always fascinated in this idea of a larger interconnectedness and how that relates to us and relationships to everything else. How we treat each other and why we should treat each other in a better way.
“I was super-fascinated with quantum physics because it was telling me at the fundamental level, we’re not separate. Fundamental particles that we thought are separate are all interconnected,” she said.
Condo was working in a studio next to Nico Williams, a master Anishinaabe beadwork artist in Canada.
“His work began to tie in to me with a perspective of the world, a link between quantum physics and an Indigenous ideology. Nico gave me a string of beads; I put them on my wall. Then one day I looked at the beads and I realized that every part contains the whole, every single unit contains the totality. If you look at it in one direction, it’s obviously a tiny unit. If you turn it to the side, you can see that it’s infinite in this loop that keeps going and going. I thought it was the perfect symbol to start speaking about the things that I was interested in. One placed beside another, placed beside another, placed beside another, becomes this giant tapestry.
“It all links into an understanding of harmonies within ecology and why it’s important to respect others and to look for harmony and balances to maintain cycles that are beneficial for people,” Condo said.
For Condo, traditional floral motifs and stories and narratives are woven into the imagery that she chooses based on a particular show. To make the beads themselves became a master class in innovation. She first made them by hand using a dangerous wood lathe, though it was more a concept of a bead without a hole for threading. Then she found a wood wheel carver who could make them in quantities of hundreds of thousands as the work got bigger.
She paints the background with the patterns and then needs to hand-paint each bead with four to seven coats to get the surface she wants, then glues the beads on the panel. It’s incredibly labor-intensive; she now has assistants to help.
“It’s a very meditative process,” Condo says. “And it’s a process that you have to repeat over and over again. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of beads, many different layers. It’s important though to the whole piece at the end, the energy that we’re putting into the practice.”
What does she want people who are unfamiliar with this whole world of Indigenous beading to take away from this work?
“A larger picture of the work is just this reflection of worldviews and thinking of other perspectives and even question our own perspective and worldview. Sometimes we’re so ingrained in a particular worldview, we don’t even understand that it is a worldview and that other people might be having different understandings or different experiences.
“Not everybody has to understand it on the first take. Art is like that, just being able to take it in and see how you feel about it being in front of the work as a starting point. Then if you have a particular interest, spending more time learning more about the work,” she said.
Gallery owner Sarah Gavlak said in a prepared statement that she was “beyond thrilled to welcome Renée Condo to the Gavlak family.
“Renée’s sweeping beadwork compositions invite us to slow down, to feel, and to recognize the threads that connect us all. They carry beauty, empathy, and heart at their core—values that resonate so strongly with me and with the mission of our gallery,” Gavlak’s statement said.
Condo’s show at the Gavlak opens Nov. 15 and runs through Dec. 13. On Nov. 22, the gallery will host a conversation between Condo and Yale scholar and curator Sháńdíín Brown.
The Gavlak Gallery is located at 2406 Florida Ave., West Palm Beach. Call 561-833-0583 or visit Gavlakgallery.com.