Beam’s interest in cross-cultural symbols and broadly humanistic experience is expressed by his use of iconic photographs of international events. In this work, the depersonalized news video footage of the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 is transposed into the very personal medium of hand-brushed watercolour, and juxtaposed with a photograph of a First Nations Prairie wedding. The artist’s engagement with world politics was a deliberate attempt to challenge the restrictive barriers of what properly constituted “appropriate” subject matter for Indigenous artists in the 1980s.

© Carl Beam / CARCC Ottawa 2024