SANTA FE, N. Mex. — Currently on view at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is Rick Rivet: Travels, Mounds and Metaphysicsa solo exhibition that transports viewers away from the adobe-clad, chili-tinged capital of New Mexico to polar latitudes where sea ice and twilight skies merge into ambiguous spaces that hold symbols of transformation, indigenous stories and shamanic beliefs suspended in time, memory, and the ephemeral.
Rick Rivet (Sahtu-Métis) is a painter from the Northwest Territories of Canada. He grew up in the hamlet of Aklavik in the Mackenzie River Delta, just south of the Beaufort Sea. The inhabitants of the region are mainly Inuit and First Nations; Rivet’s Métis family is of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry. These cultures and their intersecting histories, as well as the geographies that dictate modes of transportation and lifestyles, are common themes and sources of inquiry in the artist’s Symbolic Expressionist acrylic and mixed media paintings.
Rivet’s palette evokes his arctic origin. Among his influences are the modernists Rauschenberg, Rothko and Turner, and his study of their techniques is evident in the way he applies paint. Layered washes and drops of aurora borealis greens and magentas mingle with icy blue undertones. Passages of scribbled and scrambled brilliant white rest on ethereal fields of pastel colors like a thin layer of snow. Graphic black shapes cut into compositions suggesting the silhouettes of distant boats, night skies and deep waters. The blood red lines imply navigation paths and likewise the red crosses represent the stars in the sky.
Many of the paintings speak of spiritual experiences and shamanic beliefs. Others reveal historical traumas as in Rivet Beothuk mound (2019), which discusses the genocide of the Beothuk people who once inhabited what is now Newfoundland, and contemporary emergencies in a world affected by global warming as in its above the beach (2019) paintings, which depict endangered arctic animals cooking under sunset-colored skies.
Themes of land, sea and migration are prevalent in Rivet. Northwest Passage (2019), Franklin Expedition (2018), and Amundsen (2011) paintings. These works examine the journeys and tragedy experienced by explorers of the Canadian Arctic. For example, “Franklin Expedition” cites the failed British voyage of exploration to the Arctic led by Captain Sir John Franklin in 1845, which ended when his ships became icebound for more than a year. year. Nearly two dozen passengers, including Franklin, died, while the rest disappeared into the tundra. “Northwest Passage–5” (2019) features a more peaceful scene that combines footage from Rivet’s Beothuk mound And Northwest Passage paintings. A black half-canoe containing a corpse, a funerary symbol in Rivet’s work, floats between a red-topped mound and the moon through a cosmic blue space that suggests rest and relief.
In a city so steeped in regional identity, the show offers a visually compelling opportunity to encounter Indigenous worldviews from outside the Southwestern United States. Rivet’s grounding in modernism allows him to explore spirituality and shamanism through abstract expressionist modes that fuse traditional Indigenous ideas and symbols with a decidedly contemporary approach to image-making.
Rick Rivet: Travels, Mounds and Metaphysics continues at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe, New Mexico) through July 2. The exhibition was curated by Chief Curator Manuela Well-Off-Man.
