Nadia Myre, Waves of Want, Vagues du Desir at National Gallery of Canada

Nadia Myre
Waves of Want, Vagues du Desir
National Gallery of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario

By EWA MONIKA ZEBROWSKI    October 13, 2025

I met Nadia Myre in 2004 when we were both represented by the same gallery in Montreal. Nadia, an indigenous artist, with an Algonquin mother, was already addressing the question of identity in her art.

She was exploring her own Aboriginal roots long before it was fashionable to do so.

With each new project her voice grew louder as she explored different mediums from beadwork to video to photography and more, having previously studied sculpture as a student of Fine Arts.

This last May the National Gallery of Canada organized a major exhibition, including 60 works from various collections. Waves of Want, Vagues du Desir, celebrated Nadia Myre and her artistic practice of the last 25 years.

Waves of Want is not a chronological survey but rather a thematic exploration.  The ideas of loss, erasure and remembering are at the heart of Myre’s artistic inquiry. Moments of encounter with history.

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Myre is represented by Division Gallery in Montreal & Toronto and teaches at Concordia University in the Fine Arts Faculty in Montreal. Her work is shown and collected nationally and internationally.

Myre possesses a strong, singular voice reminding us of the many injustices suffered by First Nations.  Her multidisciplinary work touches the collective conscious reminding us all in a quiet way, of the oppression endured by the aboriginal population at large, and the enduring effects of colonial displacement. Nadia’s work, always aesthetic, transmits emotion.  She weaves visual narratives, visual stories, for us to decipher.

Throughout the exhibition there are many works that explore themes of memory and transformation. The first object one sees upon entering the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada is a tiny bronze pipe.

The little clay pipe, cast in bronze, speaks volumes about the history of the aboriginal community and its connection to the land, reflecting both the disruption of colonialization and the persistence of indigenous sovereignty.

Pipe, 2017. Photo:  Ewa Monika Zebrowski

In 2016, Nadia was doing a residency in the UK.

She wandered the banks of the Thames River in London with her young son mud larking when she found fragments of clay tobacco pipes washed up on the shore.  This relic of the tobacco trade sparked her imagination and led to further research.

Tobacco was important to the First Nations people for thousands of years before the arrival of European explorers and settlers.  Tobacco was cultivated on native land and used during spiritual and ceremonial practices as well as for medicinal purposes. 

In later years the Scottish “Tobacco Lords”, as they were called, took over the lands, cultivated tobacco for commercial use and produced small clay pipes.

The small clay pipes that Nadia discovered inspired her to create clay beads, a reference to colonial dominance, which she incorporated into new work.  She used the beads for re-interpreting traditional baskets and for making murals.  A transformation.

The National Gallery exhibition included a photograph of a woven work made entirely of clay beads (Code Switching, 2017), an edition of 7.  The photograph was displayed in the same room along with a life-size canoe (History in Two Parts, 2000).  This piece resonated deeply and reminded me of bones, of graves. The bones of sacrifice and a forgotten history. 

Code Switching (2017) with Artist. Photo: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

The Indian Act installation introduced the exhibit.

The Indian Act is a Canadian Act of Parliament which defines how the Government of Canada interacts with the 614 First Nation bands residing in Canada.

Nadia’s interpretation of the 56 page Indian Act (1876) was first exhibited at the Oboro Gallery in Montreal in 2002.  Nadia invited 250 individuals to contribute to the creation of this monumental work.  The pages of the Act were reproduced, the words redacted with beads.  The back of the same document, but larger in size, was shown as a separate work entitled Orison 2014.  We see loose threads.  Black and white. Invisible words. The title refers to an unspoken prayer. Myre’s interpretation of this historic document in both versions reflects the weight of oppression.  

Indian Act, 2022 (detail). Photo: © Nadia Myre / CARCC Ottawa 2025. Photo: National Gallery of Canada

As we proceed through the exhibition, we encounter a wall of small photographs.  The display, found in the same room as the life-size canoe, and mandalas, carries a lot of emotion.

We see 60 photographs, front and back views of moccasins, shown in a grid ((in)tangible tangles, 2021). Each moccasin is numbered, bearing witness.  The images originated from the online archive of the Anthropology Collection at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. 

The images are toned violet, printed on metallic paper and framed.

They glisten.

Mysterious as evidence of injustice and a stolen time.

Erasure.

Memories of residential schools echo.

What is the meaning of violet? 

A reference to the symbolic traditions of wampum, small purple and white shell beads, used for important exchanges and events in other times?

A reference to martyrs and the Church?

The purple tone removes the photographs from the realm of reality.

Sacred objects.

Seeing this grid begs many critical questions for me.

Who did these moccasins belong to?

Why were they taken away from their owners?
Who collected them and why?

Who today is aware of their existence in the museum archive?

(in)tangible tangles (2021) with Artist. Photo: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

These delicate artifacts become evidence of a people robbed of their identity and their land.

This evidence, hidden in an archive, is revealed by the artist.

In 2018 Myre created “colonial heritage” (Contact in Monochrome) wallpaper. Simultaneously whimsical and political the all-over wallpaper pattern includes beavers, teepees, pipes, canoes etc.   These symbols raise questions about values and the nature of colonialization. This wallpaper was displayed in the context of the National Gallery of Canada exhibition. 

Contact in Monochrome, 2018. Photo: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

Canoes and beads have played a central role in the evolution of Nadia Myre’s iconography since the beginning of her career. This is reflected in several works throughout the exhibition. Nadia has created numerous mandalas using coloured glass beads, similar to those used for trading and to embellish traditional native dress.

The process of making these beaded circles is a meditative practice, both symbolic and aesthetic, echoing past traditions, reimagined, and represented in a  contemporary context.  The beaded works created by hand, are scanned and printed and presented as photographs, unique wall pieces. (Meditation, Respite for the immortals, 2017).    

Waves of Want included a few iterations of the canoe, an important means of transportation for native peoples. Nadia pays tribute to the long history of this beautiful, graceful, vehicle of transportation throughout the exhibit.  The canoe takes on poetic meaning.

Installation view of room with History in Two Parts (2000). Photo: © Nadia Myre / CARCC Ottawa 2025. Photo: National Gallery of Canada        

A full-scale canoe made of aluminum and birch bark (History in Two Parts, 2000) inhabits a space in the gallery in an imposing way.  The use of two materials symbolizes the co-existence and clash of two cultures.

On a later wall we see an early video (Portrait in Motion, 2002) of a person paddling a canoe on a lake. We come to realize that the paddler is the artist herself.  She paddles toward the viewer, a long languid sequence and then turns away, her back to the viewer, as she disappears off camera.

A statement on presence and absence. 

It is interesting to note that the canoe Myre is paddling in the video is the same canoe we see in the exhibition.  The two parts become a metaphor for her own mixed identity as she meets the colonial gaze. 

Past and present.

In the Wake of Shadows, 2024, another of the five videos within the exhibit, portrays the artist staring out of a circular boat window, a portal into the future or into the past. 

The shadowy figure faces the window, as we see the waves rising and falling, rising and falling.

A deep blue colour.

The horizon sometimes visible.

Ambiguous. Timeless.

In the Wake of Shadows, 2024. Photo: Ewa Monika Zebrowski

Nadia’s work raises questions of identity throughout the exhibition.

We sense the artist searching to understand the past and the present and to inform the viewer, creating dialogue and engagement.

For Nadia Myre, remembering history is essential, a key to understanding the present.

Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us, 2024. Photo: © Nadia Myre / CARCC Ottawa 2025. Photo: National Gallery of Canada        

The various texts in the Gregg shorthand presentations represent a secret language suspended in time (Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us, 2024).  A search for meaning. Forms become letters, letters become words, words become sentences, phrases.   The symbols are made of two different types of clay, black and white.

We see the form, but do not understand the content.
A hidden history. A certain disconnect.
The narrative is indecipherable, illegible.
A reference to lost languages and understanding.

Nadia carries her personal history, her scars, within. She has been making art about her identity as an aboriginal woman living in a contemporary landscape since the 2004. She has been trying to unravel and share her own history, suspended in the history of her community.

Hers is a poignant, engaged ongoing journey.  Nadia explores symbols of the past within a new contemporary perspective.  Her journey becomes my journey as I also try to understand and decipher the narrative, and the silence and injustices of the past.

"Nadia produces works that invite exchange and dialogue. She highlights raw facts, observations.  Although she is eminently political, she doesn’t make demands: she registers and records past facts and highlights injustices by maintaining that neocolonialism is still colonialism, that forgiveness is not forgetting, and that scars do not lie, even though they are signs of healing or relief."                                  

    - Robert Myre, from an essay written by Marie-Eve Beaupré, "Nadia Myre. Tout Geste est et Politique" in Nadia Myre: Waves of Want /Vagues du Desir Catalogue (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 2025)