Exodus from the Soil is an impressively scaled and intricately detailed canvas by Dënesuline artist Alex Janvier, completed in 1978. A warm white background serves as a spare field for Janvier’s wildly experimental and iconic brushed designs that were at the core of his more than 70-year career. With Exodus, Janvier has deviated from his strictly hard-edged paint application to include lightly brushed calligraphic strokes, like those typically used in underpainting while developing a canvas’s composition. Vine-like wisps burst outwards from the centre of the canvas like new growth searching for sunshine, water and support, forming an armature for Janvier’s harder, denser designs that cluster inside the connected systems in tones of cyan, orange and green.

The diverse iterations of patterning avoid cohering into identifiable subject matter or cultural symbols, instead maintaining an abstract language derived by the artist associatively, inspired by his upbringing and cumulative experiences as an artist. Janvier recalls growing up on the Le Goff Reserve, Cold Lake First Nations, in northern Alberta: “The old porcupine quill designs were angular and straight-edged. In later years, the Hudson’s Bay beads came, and the geometric rigidity was loosened by the freedom of the new beads. This is where my art began, watching the old ladies doing their new free-flowing designs.”

His drive towards abstraction, influenced by both Indigenous traditions and Western styles, would impact Janvier’s entire career artistically and politically. In 1973, Janvier, along with fellow artists Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Norval Morisseau, Daphne Odjig, Carl Ray and Joseph Sanchez, formed Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. (PNIAI), a legally incorporated entity with the goal of promoting these Indigenous Canadian artists as a collective. The group sought recognition from galleries, institutions and the government that had to this point excluded Indigenous artists from official canons of Canadian art history.

A PNIAI group exhibition at Max Stern’s influential Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1975 proved to be a watershed moment, opening a succession of opportunities for the seven PNIAI artists. By 1978, the year this canvas was produced, PNIAI was winding down its activities in part due to the success of meeting its original objectives and the strength of its members’ individual careers. Janvier had by this time garnered countless important commissions, sales and exhibitions internationally.

Exodus from the Soil was a centrepiece of the traveling 2014 exhibition 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., originating at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and curated by Michelle LaVallee. The exhibition’s award-winning catalogue, which reproduces this work, discusses the group’s lengthy battles for Indigenous recognition in Canadian art and the countless obstacles that Janvier and PNIAI overcame due to their resilience and collective sense of purpose. With ancestral ties and connection to the land at the core of PNIAI and Janvier’s ethos, the group worked to develop a new, modern Indigenous art language that gained recognition in the Canadian art world.

Exodus from the Soil reflects Janvier’s deep cultural and spiritual attachment to the land, rooted in the soil’s regenerative properties that allow for the seasonal flourishing of plants and animals that sustain us. The painting can be read as richly symbolic of Janvier’s vision for a growing, self-determined Indigenous art movement in Canada and its limitless potential. During his speech at the opening of the Regina exhibition, Janvier said, “Our story is really a Canadian story, a real Canadian story. It comes from here, by the people from here, and it’s about here. I welcome you all to take a good look and feel proud.”

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