Ace, Barry (2018) - Memory Landscape 2 [Photographs, hand sewn beadwork on giclee] ©Government of Ontario Art Collection, Archives of Ontario
Barry Ace is a practicing visual artist and currently lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is a band member of M’Chigeeng First Nation, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada. His mixed media paintings and assemblage textile works explore various aspects of cultural continuity and the confluence of the historical and contemporary.
He states, “My textile and paper works replicate traditional Great Lakes’ floral motifs often sourced from reclaimed and salvaged electronic schematics and circuitry (capacitors and resistors) that act as metaphors for cultural continuity (antithesis of stasis), bridging the past with the present and the future. In doing so, my work intentionally integrates traditional cultural art practices, such as beadwork, which is then juxtaposed against contemporary ephemera, breaking new ground as a distinct genre of contemporary indigenous abstraction.”