Once Upon a Time there was an Artist Named Garry Sanipass…

Garry Sanipass– I am a creator, an artist, and I live in Bouctouche NB.

Artist statement 2025

My name is Garry Sanipass.  I live on the Bouctouche first nation and I am a meta-modern indigenous artist.

I create rectangular paintings using egg tempera and natural pigments, incorporating audience engagement through cell phones. This approach allows me to challenge the rigid, rectangular categories that dehumanize Indigenous people and instead foster a sense of unity within our shared human family.

 This canvas, in the shape of the golden rectangle, features black and yellow textile pigments that form ancient Mikmaq shamanic symbols. It also includes a QR code that compels the viewer to engage with it, while being mesmerized by a sacred chronotopia. This invites the viewer into a state of temporal dissonance, where the present and past intertwine, folding time into an unsettling yet transformative experience. This mirrors my own experience during a Sundance ceremony, where I danced in the sun for four days without food or water. During that time, I discovered that my conscious intentions were not aligned with my subconscious needs. 

I transfix the viewer in order to help him/her to see he’s/she’s been reduced from a whole human being with aspirations, dreams, frustrations, passions to a single functioning consumer that can never be satiated. 

We’ve been transformed from a whole being into a mere consumer, A Windigo.

I created this dynamic, interactive experience that goes beyond just a single medium to express my belief that true alignment between conscious and subconscious mind is essential for personal growth and effective action.  I believe that when these two parts of the self are in conflict or not in harmony, one’s efforts are less effective.  True power and clarity come from bridging this split, aligning one’s intentions  and actions with their deeper subconscious desires and truths. 

My anger and frustration is projected on society when I am not living my life authentically and responsibly.  If I can use this art practice as a ritual, perhaps I can align myself and other’s as well.  

Mediums and materials.

My choice to make my own pigments and work with egg tempera is both an artistic and philosophical act. It reflects my resistance to the forces of consumerism—an attempt to break the spell.
To break free from a contract we never read,
never signed,
but were born into.
A contract that dictates not just how we live, but how we create.
By sourcing my own materials—grinding bone, gathering rocks, binding pigments with egg—I reclaim agency over my process. I return art to its alchemical roots,
where transformation begins with the earth itself,
and the artist becomes a bridge between nature, spirit, and symbol.
This is not nostalgia.
It is rebellion through ritual.

Performance art.

I use my body, the natural environment, found objects, and simple materials to ground my performance work in something raw and real. I often choose locations in nature, wear clothes from Frenchies, and make my own masks from plaster of Paris—because it’s direct, effective, and accessible. My goal is simplicity: to demonstrate that meaningful art doesn’t require elaborate tools.

In one performance in Sackville, I intentionally included digital technology alongside the natural world and my physical presence. This convergence—body, land, and machine—reflects the layered complexity of contemporary life. I wanted to explore that friction, that mix of worlds.

Although spontaneity and intuition play a role, I don’t believe art is solely the result of divine inspiration. I studied art history to understand the design principles and the lineage of major movements. There are patterns and rules, and I want to build from them consciously. But I also recognize that the historical art canon is deeply biased—centered almost entirely on European narratives, often excluding Indigenous perspectives altogether.

As an Indigenous artist, I’m not just reacting to this gap—I’m inserting myself into that history. I bring in European influences and Indigenous thought, and I allow them to conflict, to wrestle. That tension—the meeting of shadow and light, colonizer and colonized, tradition and resistance—is where something new can emerge. Like Carl Jung said: it’s in the opposition of dualities that creativity is born.