This Anishinaabe artist uses beaded lottery tickets to scratch at Indigenous history
'I just tried to put little pieces of history into those mots cachés,' says Nico Williams
Bingo and Mots cachés are two lottery scratch games one can find at any Quebec convenience store, but Anishinaabe artist Nico Williams is using them to explore narratives of Indigenous history.
Using thousands of Delica beads, Williams and his studio team spent much of the pandemic creating a series of six scratch tickets for Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain as a part of a new exhibition called la machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux.
"I was thinking a lot about the colours at first because I love the colours of the scratch tickets," said Williams, who is originally from Aamjiwnaang First Nation in southwestern Ontario.
"I wanted to just experiment with playing around and putting patterns on the small grids of the Bingo tickets, and then the idea evolved when I started to work on the Mots cachés."
That included incorporating words that represent Indigenous history and culture, and important moments that have highlighted the colonial relationship between First Nations and Canada, into the popular word search game.
"I just tried to put little pieces of history into those mots cachés [crosswords], thinking about them as these really important objects that people can access in a [convenience store]. It's like in front of us; it's accessible. Scratching away history also was a part of it, too," said Williams.
The work also touches the connection of being back home in his community and bingo, he said. He first came across the idea of beading a scratch ticket after finding one in the snow.
"It was just glowing, and I was like, 'Oh, my goodness, look at the colours of that ticket,'" said Williams.
"I remember picking it up and I was like, 'I'm going to bead this object and it's going to represent a bridge between communities.'"
He said he feels the object speaks both to Indigenous folks and non-Indigenous allies, or whoever has access to a convenience store.
Williams has been using beads as his choice of medium for the last six years. His first solo exhibition nearly three years ago featured geometric beaded sculptures inspired by Anishihnaabe bandolier bags.
"As a material, I fell in love with it at first because of the colours," said Williams.
"It's the material I love. I'm attracted to the colour, the texture, the comfort that it brings to me and working with it."
The Musée d'art contemporain reopens to the public on Feb. 10. La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux runs until April 25 and brings together the work of 34 artists from in and around Montreal, including several Indigenous artists.
"It's just like spectacular to see all of the artists come together in one space," said Williams.
Co-curator Mark Lanctôt said the exhibition revolves around a theme of how language is inscribed in bodies, gestures, and materials.
"There was something in the way he was using craft which is pretty recurrent in the show but turning it on its head, crafting something very meticulously but using as a subject matter something benign, something you'd see every day in a depanneur when you walk in displayed out on the counter," said Lanctôt.
"He has this really great way of having a sustained gaze on something that wouldn't really attract attention otherwise."
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