I really do think if I could own any artwork, Joyce Wieland's O Canada would be wayyyy up high on my list. Such a simple concept, so effectively executed. To accompany it of course, I would need her incredible quilt Reason Over Passion. Then I'd stuff the 1971 True Patriot Love catalogue (from her show at the National Gallery) in my dusty bookshelf. That catalogue-a conceptual work of its own- was originally titled The Illustrated Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, which Wieland unbound and filled with Canadiana 'things', everything from letters to flowers. Wieland is the only female artist who made it into the art history lectures I attended that incorporated Canadian nationalism into her work. Besides that though, her work has this perfect combination of DIY-aesthetics and craft (particularly the quilting), rooted in feminine history, producing a complexity to the nationalistic work in True Patriot Love.
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