AWARD-WINNING WRITER ARMAND GARNET RUFFO FEATURED IN ACE’S NEW EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

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Order Coalesce Exhibition Catalogue Now from WLU Press (here)

“If we are the future. The birds speak – as does all life – they circle overhead and tell us that western science is finally catching up. It now verifies that the belief in the primacy of a holistic connection to Mother Earth holds important truths for humanity. It is an ancient body of knowledge about the natural world that Indigenous people draw upon to find connection to all living things, and in so doing find our place in the world.” Excerpt from Breaking the Mold by Armand Garnet Ruffo.

In 2019, Ace presented his exhibition Coalesce, curated by Suzanne Luke, at the Robert Langen Art Gallery, Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. The exhibition ran from February 25 to April 5, 2019 and coincided with Indigenous Education week. Ace undertook a public lecture on his work and art practice in the Paul Martin Centre on March 7, 2019. The event was co-hosted in collaboration with the Indigenous Education Council, and prior to his lecture, Ace spent the afternoon visiting with students in the Indigenous Students Centre.

For Ace’s exhibition catalogue, celebrated scholar, filmmaker, writer and poet Armand Garnet Ruffo was invited to participate in the project, and he has contributed a beautifully written and thoughtfully constructed creative piece entitled Breaking the Mold.

The exhibition catalogue follows Robert Langen Art Gallery’s unique publication format, where works of art by visual artists are juxtaposed against highly creative written works by celebrated Canadian and Indigenous writers. The essays are not critical curatorial writings, but instead are often prose works that draw thematically from the exhibition, but are written in a literary way that complements the visual artist’s work.

Armand Garnet Ruffo was born and raised in the Oji-Cree territory of northern Ontario and is a member of the Chapleau Cree Fox Lake First Nation.  He is the recipient of a Honourary Life Member Award from the League of Canadian poets and an inaugural Mayor’s Arts Award from the City of Kingston. He is the author of Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, (Douglas & McIntyre, 2014) shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award.  His latest publication is Treaty# (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019) and his latest film collaboration is “On The Day The World Begins Again,” a video-poem, which premiered at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival in 2019. He lives in Kingston, Ontario, where he is the Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous literature at Queen’s University.

“Armand Ruffo wins Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize” (here)

Robert Langen Art Gallery (here)