David Garneau

This candy represents the noose used to execute Louis Riel, a formative death that haunts we, Métis, and you, Canadians. Enjoy the sweet sorrow of history made tangible as it melts on your tongue like a sacred wafer.

David Garneau (Métis) is a Visual Arts Professor at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and critical writing. He recently co-curated, with Kathleen Ash Milby, Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee, an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools, other forms of aggressive assimilation, and (re)conciliation, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina; and With Secrecy and Despatch, with Tess Allas, an international exhibition about massacres of Indigenous people, and memorialization, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, Australia. Garneau has recently given keynote talks in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and throughout Canada. He is part of a five-year, SSHRC funded, curatorial research project, “Creative Conciliation;” and is working on a public art project in Edmonton. His paintings are in numerous public and private collections.