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Otherwise unexplained fires: Joyce Wieland and the experimental film scene in 1960s New York: a fixture of New York's avant-garde film milieu in the 60s, Wieland's ultimate subject was Canada.

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In the spring of 1971, Joyce Wieland sat down with her close friend and occasional collaborator, American filmmaker Hollis Frampton, and recorded a discussion about their respective art practices. Frampton took on the role of the interviewer and his questions reveal not only a familiarity with Wieland's oeuvre but also a curious interest in her relationship to her homeland. When Frampton asks, "How do you feel about Canadian artists who have stayed in Canada?" she answers, "I think they could have benefitted by spending two or three years in other places." (1)

In that same year, having lived in New York since 1962, Wieland moved back to Toronto following the opening of her solo exhibition, True Patriot Love/Veritable Amour Patriotique at the National Gallery of Canada--the gallery's first solo exhibition by a woman artist. This exhibition, Wieland's call to Canadian collectivity and patriotism, challenged the conventions of display and viewership typical of a national museum by taking myriad forms and revealing the breadth and depth of Wieland's practice from 1960 onwards. Predating MOMA's first solo exhibition by a female artist (Louise Bourgeois, in 1984), Pierre Theberge, the exhibition's curator, selected Wieland not simply to make a political statement about her gender but because, as he stated, she was a terrific artist. When the show opened on Canada Day, viewers were greeted by a Plexiglas enclosure housing 24 ducklings and four ducks, fed each morning by Theberge. The air was perfumed with a scent designed by Wieland, Sweet Beaver Perfume (1971), a punning turn of phrase sugestive of the artist's sense of humour and frequent references to a female-centred sexuality. Wieland's Arctic Passion Cake (1971), made from Styrofoam covered with white icing and measuring six feet in diameter and three feet high, was designed and executed by parliamentary pastry chef Jan Van Dierendonck. Decorating the cake was a figurative tableau of a wounded polar bear estranged from his mate and a woman suckling two children in the form of beavers (one French and one English) lying prone amongst miniature fir trees. Dotted across the iced Arctic landscape were edible petits fours in the shape of stones from the Canadian Shield, which rested amongst provincial flowers and crests of Canada. Recordings of loons played throughout the gallery, and the walls were hung with an array of Wieland's quilts.

The feminine realm had arrived and taken up residence in the museum. Countering the rarefied notion of the autonomous artist, Wieland introduced collaborative craft-based labour into the gallery, commissioning a number of women to create a selection of works for the show. She had become increasingly preoccupied with Canada as a subject, and with True Patriot Love/Veritable Amour Patriotique she unapologetically indulged in her fascination with the country...