I Am YEG Arts: Braxton Garneau

Visual artist Braxton Garneau has always been a collector, packing his pockets with bits and bobs of inspiration. As his practice evolves, these found materials have become central to his work, combining classical portraiture with Afro-Caribbean cultural references. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts feature, Braxton explains the importance of material honesty, costuming, and transformation in his work, and reflects on recent accomplishments, such as his first solo show in Los Angeles, and being named as a finalist for the 2023/24 Salt Spring National Arts Prize. 

What’s the creative process like for you? Where do you usually start? 

Observation is a huge part of the creative process. I’m always taking in the works of other artists, just even walking down the street, like forms and shadows. I’m constantly cataloging what’s around me and what I can access on the Internet. It’s always kind of churning in my head. And then once I sit down, it’s a bit of play. I have a bunch of materials that I’ve collected over the years, objects that I’ll stack and glue and nail and sew together. It can also start out with something as easy as a sketch or just loose mark making, and I’ll start many sessions just playing and then things start to happen. And then if the light bulb goes off, I take it from there. 

In your recent work, you’ve been incorporating materials like sugar cane, chicken bones, and asphalt. Tell us a bit about the materials that you choose to work with and why you’re drawn to them. 

I’ve always been that person, that little boy who came home with rocks and sticks, robins’ eggs, petrified wood, and arrowheads. To this day, I look down when I walk. I’m fascinated with little bits and bobs that I can bring home. It wasn’t till maybe a year and a half ago that I decided why not bring this innate interest into the rest of my practice? I used to feel like my collection of things was separate from my artistic practice; it was just something that I did on my own to generate ideas. I didn’t feel like it was appropriate to bring into my practice, and once I let go of that idea, I think it’s made my work a lot stronger, and it’s made the process a lot more enjoyable. 

So, the material specifically – the asphalt – is important because it links my work geographically to Alberta and to Trinidad, where my father’s family is from. In Trinidad, it’s one of the largest naturally exposed bodies of asphalt in the world. That resource played a significant role in the colonization of the island and the rest of the Caribbean and the Americas. Asphalt was used to pave roads. It was used to patch ships. And that aside, it’s also formally such a fascinating material to use. I use it as my black in my paintings, my foundational pigment, but it’s such a chromatic material. It can be very warm or very cool depending on what it’s placed on, how much water is added to it, and even just the various states that it can exist in depending on the temperature. When it’s cold, it becomes rock hard, and you can crunch it and powder it. When it’s hot, it becomes gooey and putty like, and then when it’s really warm it’s liquidy. There are endless applications. And also, conceptually it ties my work to the province I was born in to the place where my grandparents came from. 

The bones – it’s not specifically chicken bones – I actually started out using cow vertebrae. There’s a dish in Trinidad called oxtail and it’s just a stewed cow tail, and it’s a dish I grew up with. One day I just decided to save the bones and bleached them and incorporated those into a sculpture. It also lends to this tradition in the Caribbean of making use of the scraps and cherishing the rough ends, not letting anything go to waste. 

Sugar cane is also a material that’s culturally significant to the Caribbean. The sugar industry shaped colonization in the Caribbean as well. It’s also a beautiful material, and it’s diverse: the fibers can be used to sew with, I use the bark to give structure to my sculptures. And formally, again, there’s endless possibilities when you work with natural materials, and there’s always a new way of incorporating them. I think it also ties my work into these historical relationships between humans and these resources. Historically there’s a harvest festival in Trinidad that involved the burning of cane and that kind of morphed into a protest and a celebration that’s become modern day Carnival. 

In your artist statement you mention that your practice is ​“rooted in costuming, transformation, and material honesty”. Tell us what this means to you and your artistic practice.

I have this innate fascination with costumes that I’ve had since I was a kid. I think most kids are mesmerized by seeing someone in a costume. I loved dressing up as a kid; I spent most of my childhood dressed up as an animal or in drag of some sort. It was exhilarating and it was a tool to help me express myself. Costuming is a part of Carnival in Trinidad. It can be a tool to help you express a variety of desires, and it helps you take on the identity of something very foreign. Also, I was born on Halloween, so it was inescapable that I love the idea of being in a costume and being spooky, wild, and weird.

The idea of transformation also lends to my fascination with asphalt. It’s this material that’s constantly transforming. Everything is constantly in flux and experiencing entropy, but natural materials, as they age, I find that very fascinating. I love incorporating a piece of wood or a piece of fibre into a piece, and then seeing how it’s changed a year later; how the asphalt has been pulled into the fibres of the canvas; how the colouration of wood shifts over time. So yes, I’m fascinated with transformation on many levels – on a material level and also the ability for a person to transform themselves.

I think it reflects the vulnerable nature of being a human and also traditions and identity. They are things that don’t necessarily erode, but they’re impacted by time. It’s something that scares me a lot, and so I’ve decided to embrace change and the impact of time on myself and my practice. To touch back on my use of materials, I used to be fixated on making my works very archival and very commercial. That prevents you from using materials that will become altered by time.

Tell us about your recent solo show in LA. What was that experience like? And has it opened up new opportunities?

Yeah, that was fantastic. I’m immensely grateful to the Edmonton Arts Council for providing me with the funding to realize this project. It was over 30 pieces and an installation that I was able to send down and install in Los Angeles. The American market is entirely different than the Canadian market. It allowed me to share my work with an audience that I had not previously had access to. To get feedback from people who are truly strangers was amazing.

It was my first large commercial solo exhibition in America, so it was all new. I learned a lot, and as far as opportunities I don’t know if they have presented themselves yet, but I definitely reached an entirely new audience and only time will tell. It introduced me to some curators and galleries in the States, and I’m hoping to pursue those relationships wherever they go.

Congratulations on being one of the Salt Spring National Art Prize 2023/24 finalists! Tell us about what this recognition means to you and how it will impact your career.

I’m very grateful to be included amongst such a talented group of individuals. I had not heard of most of these artists, so it’s a special feeling to be included. It also made me realize that I have to do a better job of keeping up with my fellow Canadian artists because there are amazing artists in this country that I’ve clearly overlooked. I’m beyond excited to see the works of the other finalists (the work won’t be public until the end of the month). I’m hoping it leads to more exhibition possibilities within Canada. I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to share my work outside of Alberta, within Canada.

Tell us a little bit about what you’re currently working on or hoping to explore next.

I was away for the summer, and I was lucky enough to travel around Europe and all those trips were based around museums. I spent my entire summer absorbing art from the Masters, I’m looking forward to channeling all that inspiration. I took an absurd amount of photos!

There are some potential exhibitions in the states next year that I am making paintings for, and I also have a new project where I am refurbishing antique clocks and repurposing them, combining them with stained glass windows. I actually just received my glass grinding machine and sheets of glass this morning. I’ll be combining those antique clocks with stained glass windows and then painting the interiors with oil paints. That’s going to take up a lot of time; there’s new skills for me to learn there.

I also want to continue to push my use of asphalt and found materials. You can arrange them and layer them in an infinite number of ways. I plan to play and explore it until I have another one of those moments that that feels right, where I find a direction that inspires me.

About Braxton Garneau

Braxton Garneau is a visual artist based in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). He holds a BFA from the University of Alberta and has had solo exhibitions at Stride Gallery, Calgary (2021) and Parallel Space, Edmonton (2019). His work was featured in the retrospective exhibition Black Every Day at the Art Gallery of Alberta (2021), It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900 — 1970 and Now at Mitchell Art Gallery (2020), curated by Seika Boye, and New Direction, curated by AJ Girard and Artx at Château Cîroc, Miami, Florida (2021). Most recently, he had his first American solo exhibition at GAVLAK, Los Angeles (2023).

Working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation, Garneau’s practice is rooted in costuming, transformation, and material honesty. Combining visual influences from classical European portraiture and Afro-Caribbean culture with harvested and hand-processed materials, he creates portraits, shrines, and corporeal forms that explore the sociocultural history of his Caribbean heritage. The materials used – raffia, sugarcane pulp, cowrie shells, asphalt – share inextricable colonial histories and cultural ties to those who’ve spent generations in close proximity to them.

Garneau’s recent body of work specifically looks at the traditions of costuming and European influences on the development of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, and its precursor ​“Canboulay” from the French ​“cannes brulés”, meaning burnt cane, as a slave revolt and parallel celebration formed in response to 18^th century French plantation owners masquerades (Mas).