Consider this combination of feminism and patriotism in Joyce Wieland’s famous O Canada lithograph of women’s mouths singing the national anthem. To make this print, Wieland put on greasy lipstick and pressed her lips onto a clean lithography stone, forming the syllables of O Canada.
[Above: Joyce Wieland, O Canada 1969, a lithograph in red on wove paper, National Gallery of Canada ]
-O Canada Animation (1970): The 71 mouths forming the words to the national anthem are embroidered in red lips and white teeth on cotton.
One of the country’s first, and best known, feminist artists, Wieland was indefatigable from the 1960s onward in the two endeavours that brought her fame: avant-garde feminist film-making and her experimental art. She is a Canadian art icon. She died in 1998 at the age of 66.
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[…] “I’m a Canadian,” Joyce Wieland told the New York Times in 1971. “I believe in Canada. We should work for a unified Canada —English and French—as Canadians, not as anti-Americans. We should be more positive about ourselves.” (Below, O Canada in lips, see more here) […]
[…] for reading. I got the header photo here; a great blog for Canadian art […]
[…] categories of artists I follow especially closely: Pioneering women, and Canadians. I know and love Wieland’s work, but this piece had passed me by. It suddenly occurred to me that it’s a kind of animal […]
i’d never seen this. my first feeling is that the earlier, more spur of the moment version, with the lipstick works better. almost like animation.
it’d be neat to see it as a flip-the-pages type of animation.
(don’t know the actual term for this!)
thanks for honouring int’l woman’s day!!
http://michellecfecit.wordpress.com/
Hi Michelle – Nice to hear from you again, and I love the flip-the-pages idea. She did a great many lips style works, so it probaby would be possible.
These are super cool.
I saw the original of the O Canada lithograph and it really is superb.