Bright Oriental Star Rachel Kalpana James (b. 1961) Video installation 2011 8 minutes ARTIST STATEMENT I came to know about Rabindranath Tagore’s 1929 visit to Canada after viewing a painting by Group of Seven artist Frederick Varley. Though not widely known, as I discovered, these seemingly disparate subjects are meaningfully linked. Newspapers reported that Tagore was the first non-white winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his prose poem Gitanjali. His ideas on freedom in art, education, spirituality, and politics achieved world recognition and he received many invitations to Canada. Tagore, however, repeatedly declined those invitations in protest of Canada’s treatment of his countrymen in the infamous Komagata Maru incident of 1914. When Tagore finally visited Canada in 1929, thousands came to hear him lecture and it was reported, “He was the bright oriental star of the occasion…” (Canadian Theosophist, 1929). Group of Seven artist Varley may have played a role in facilitating this visit. This is the historical backdrop, compiled from archival and secondary sources, from which Bright Oriental Star (2011) was created. Visually, it is a journey through stylized Canadian landscapes interspersed with text. Conceptually, it reflects on ideas of beauty, spirituality and identity that both Rabindranath Tagore and the Canadian Group of Seven painters of the early 1900’s sought in nature. While the work is an exploration of Tagore’s 1929 visit and its link to the Group of Seven, it is also about erasure. Embedded in the Group of Seven’s paintings is a neglect of the reality of aboriginal peoples and colonial settlement, something that Tagore, as a colonial subject himself, brought to the fore. By juxtaposing historic texts including Tagore’s poetry, newspaper headlines, and Canadian art history, I offer a narrative of Tagore’s visit that reveals colonial reality and invites viewers to consider how we derive particular meaning from land, language, archive, and art. Bright Oriental Star (2011) is the third of my projects on Tagore, after The Home and the World (2003) and Tagore and Mrs. E. (2000). Rachel Kalpana James, 2011