James Mishibinijima
Untitled (Mishmountain)

36 x 48 inches
Acrylic on Canvas

Against a burning sky, the land takes human form, resting beneath a horizon of black spruce. In the Mishmountain style for which Mishibinijima is best known, the body is rendered in the pale blue-white of quartzite, and within it the life the land carries, leaf and seed shapes, and the small blue circles of water moving through stone. Bands of red mark the joints, and at the figure's side sits a vessel patterned with the same growing forms.

This is the visual language Mishibinijima built over a lifetime, drawn from the Anishinaabe country of Manitoulin Island and the North Channel. It sets aside the separation between a person and the ground they stand on, holding instead that the land is living, that it carries memory, and that what moves through it moves through us.

The Mishmountain body of work is finite. By the artist's own account he completed 348 Mishmountain originals, fewer than 50 of them in Canada, and he no longer paints in this style. This work is shown publicly for the first time at MNIDOO MNISING.



Price: Upon request