Death Boat and other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art

Death Boat and Other Stories investigates interpretations of transformation in Indigenous cultural art practices across Turtle Island. This exhibition features artworks drawn from the Kampelmacher Collection, which offer multifaceted worldviews situated in Indigenous knowledges and relationality. The themes of transitional space, place, and time inform a beautifully situated and embodied visual story.

Collectors Thomas Druyan and Alice Ladner began acquiring Indigenous art in 1992, amassing well over 1,000 works. The couple named the collection after Thomas Druyan’s parents, Wolf and Sala Kampelmacher. The collection illustrates myriad artistic expressions from across North America. As MacKenzie curator Felicia Gay researched the collection, she was strongly drawn to Inuk artist Roger Aksadjuak’s ceramic artwork Death Boat (2008). Gay understood Death Boat as an animate being; it spoke to her, in its own way, prompting the themes in the exhibition. At first glance, the death boat appears to represent a funerary practice, perhaps representing the transition from life to death or the continuation of life after death. As a vessel, it is carrying not only a person, but also a story. The spaces that humans, animals, and other sentient beings inhabit are temporal but never fixed. To be Indigenous is to know profoundly what transformation is.

The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection is the largest donation of Indigenous and Inuit artworks that the MacKenzie Art Gallery has received to date. Death Boat and Other Stories is the second exhibition featuring works from the Kampelmacher Memorial Collection. The first exhibition, Across the Turtle’s Back, curated by Michele LaVallee, was on view from 15 October 2016 to 30 April 2017. The collection continues to be an important resource for sharing Indigenous art practice with the public through Indigenous-centred curation.