Jason Baerg is a Cree Métis artist of international reputation working at the intersection of painting, digital media, and installation. He works from a double-consciousness that can be related to the Woodlands School, as Indigenous cultural signifiers are deeply embedded in the process and creative outcomes of his studio practice. Like writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Baerg is part of a generation that deliberately creates work on visual and linguistic terms recognizable to Indigenous viewers and readers. Non-Indigenous publics are attracted to the works through their own uptake of worldviews that are coded within the visual forms. Woodlands stands as a multigenerational reference for visual artists who have worked in this manner. Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, and their peers adopted the so-called universalism of modernist abstraction as a vocabulary within which they could express an internal landscape of spiritual, cultural, and political affirmation.
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