As I crossed the threshold into the dimly lit opening gallery that introduced Nadia Myre’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, I was caught by one of the show’s most arresting works: Oraison/Orison (Net) (2014–17). A large red net composed of twisted rope was suspended from a ceiling-mounted rotary motor and anchored to the floor by fourteen river rocks arranged in a circle. The red rope rose and fell in a steady rhythm, expanding and contracting. My breath matched its movement as we shared the same air. The effect was mesmerizing—for me, its steady motion mirrored biocultural rhythms, moving from the body’s quiet breath to the tide’s resonant swell and release. I stood in front of the work for some time, alongside my friend, a biologist, who observed that it resembled a protein folding in on itself, only to release its skeleton again. The analogy is telling. Protein folding is life-sustaining when precise, but disastrous when even a single fold falls out of place. The work evoked both calm continuity and latent fragility, suggesting how balance can tip into disorder. This duality—meditative rhythm entwined with structural tension—echoed across the exhibition. Myre’s works drew us into cycles of capture and release, containment and transformation, ultimately teaching us to move differently within those currents.
Installation view of Nadia Myre: Waves of Want. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. May 30–September 1, 2025. © Nadia Myre / CARCC Ottawa 2025. Photo: NGC.
Nadia Myre: Waves of Want, curated by Rachelle Dickenson, expanded from this meditative center. The second gallery presented works that embody change in both form and feeling. History in Two Parts (2000)—a canoe constructed of birch bark, aluminum, cedar, ash, spruce, root, and gum—anchored the room. The work stages a dialogue between Indigenous technologies of travel and colonial impositions of industry, juxtaposing natural materials with manufactured aluminum. It makes visible one of the tensions Myre continually grapples with: survival and continuity of Indigenous lifeways in the face of colonial dispossession. Nearby, a series of rawhide sculptures trimmed with faux leather seemed to hold their breath. I wanted to touch them, to test their rigidity and discover how much pressure might be required to shift their form. How much can something carry before its shape must shift, adapt, or transform?
The constricted hallway that followed felt claustrophobic, and the two looping videos—projected on the wall of an adjacent room, visible only through the hall—intensified this unease. In the Wake of Shadows (2024) shows Myre’s silhouetted figure standing inside of a tubelike structure. Water crashes in front of her. The soundscape—wave sounds and eerie, high-pitched tones—evokes a wind tunnel or a haunted shoreline. Her figure remains motionless, turned away. She is present but not available. The second video, Anonymes (2015), places the viewer within what feels like a dark, damp concrete corridor. The camera pans slowly toward a vanishing point shrouded in darkness, leaving the viewer suspended in a space of ambiguity and confinement. These works made the hallway difficult to navigate, their looping projections producing a disorientation that was both psychic and physical, as viewers would stop to watch, creating an inevitable bottleneck. In doing so, the videos recalled the challenge of moving through spaces shaped by colonial constraint—this museum, and the colonial Canadian landscape through which Myre’s films move.
Installation view of Nadia Myre: Waves of Want. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. May 30–September 1, 2025. © Nadia Myre / CARCC Ottawa 2025. Photo: NGC.
Then relief came. The fourth and fifth galleries opened back up, visually, spatially, and energetically. Fields of deep blues, warm reds, and glowing oranges reached the viewer, emitting from the series The Twilight Compositions (2024). Handmade ceramic beads formed horizon lines of setting suns, while folded ceramic baskets curved inward, suggesting softness even as they bear the gravity of clay. The gallery lighting refracted softly over glazed and matte surfaces, carrying the rhythm of waves—a rolling motion that drew out their intimate, tactile intricacies. Near the end of the exhibition, Light Assembly (Rita) (2023), a landscape woven with handmade ceramic beads, rested horizontally, its textures rippling. Its placement encouraged a wide-angle gaze, offering viewers their first opportunity since entering the galleries to stand back and see connections across works. This sense of openness contrasted sharply with the exhibition’s earlier density.
Nadia Myre, Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us (detail), 2024. Collection of the artist. © Nadia Myre / CARCC Ottawa 2025. Photo: CIAPV and Aurélien Mole.
The exhibition concluded with Your Waves of Want Wash Over Us (2024), an installation of ceramic tubes arranged across a back wall. The tubes spell out the work’s title, which also includes the exhibition’s title (Waves of Want), in Gregg shorthand—a phonetic writing system that privileges the sound of speech over conventional English spelling—emphasizing sensation over fixity. The phrase floated across a white wall, inviting us to spend time with the feeling of these words. While Myre’s use of shorthand gestured toward ways of knowing that exceed colonial containment, the kind of want referenced by the work’s title seemed both personal and systemic, and potentially dangerous. The use of your versus us evoked the waves of desire that propelled conquest and dispossession. Such desire shapes bodies, languages, and lands.
Myre’s works took viewers on an intentionally layered journey, and they resonated with generosity, inviting her audience to linger, breathe, and perceive continuity across fragmentation. But the curatorial frame was not as generous. Sparse interpretive materials left the artworks to shoulder contextual weight on their own; aside from a brief introductory text, there was little to orient audiences unfamiliar with Myre’s trajectory or the broader art-historical stakes. This reticence reflects a wider institutional tendency in exhibiting Indigenous art: a reluctance, even a refusal, by representatives of the institution to grapple with the complexity of the work.
These shortcomings were compounded by the exhibition’s adjacency to digital, cyberpunk artist Skawennati’s exhibition Welcome to the Dreamhouse. Although Skawennati’s video installations were largely experienced through headphones, ambient sounds and images seeped awkwardly into the contemplative space at the end of Waves of Want. Rather than encouraging dialogue, the sloppy curation raised questions about institutional intention. Was this pairing of two Indigenous artists a hasty gesture to compensate for, or deflect from, recent leadership controversies, including director Jean-François Bélisle’s public dismissal of decolonization as a guiding framework for the National Gallery? If so, the gesture reads less as reparative than as strategic deflection—leveraging both artists’ practices as institutional cover.
Even with these limitations, Waves of Want held undeniable power. The folds of a ceramic vessel, the hum of a string net as it breathes, the oscillation in the videos between claustrophobic unease and vastness: through its sensorial attuning, Myre’s work traces the effects of colonial legacies alongside the transformations demanded for survival and growth. In inviting us to move differently, the show insisted on histories of kinship and resistance that the curatorial frame only partially supported. Waves of Want was full of carefully evoked tensions, but it was the tension between the work’s generosity and the institution’s reticence that made plainest what is at stake—learning to move differently remains one of our strongest tools for resisting the structures that still seek to control and contain.
