Opacity and the boundaries of knowing : beyond recognition in the reception of contemporary Indigenous art

This thesis examines the value of intentionally opaque elements in contemporary Indigenous art from the perspective of a non-Indigenous viewer. When an artwork uses opacity to resist immediate comprehension, it refuses streamlined access to meaning and challenges viewers to deepen their mode of engagement. Rather than approaching artworks through optical transparency, viewers must pivot towards affective and reflective forms of engagement. Encounters with opacity privilege contemplation over consumption and create opportunities for learning through discomfort and uncertainty. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant alongside scholarship in Indigenous studies, art history, decolonial theory, and visual culture, this research situates opacity within broader critiques of colonial systems that impose asymmetrical demands for transparency and legibility. Glissant's concept of the "right to opacity" provides the central theoretical framework for arguing that opacity does not operate as invisibility or withdrawal but a modality that enables Indigenous artists to assert forms of self-determination that go beyond colonial systems of recognition. In both the production and reception of contemporary Indigenous art, opacity creates the conditions for intercultural exchange while protecting irreducible difference. Through close visual analyses of artworks by Marianne Nicolson (Dzawada'enuxw), Audie Murray (Cree-Métis), and Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg), this thesis examines how opacity operates as both an artistic strategy and a critical pedagogy. Through its ability to simultaneously separate and connects viewers, opacity reveals that artworks do not always address a single, universal public. Instead, encounters with opacity bring into focus multiple, overlapping publics with different access to language, history and cultural knowledge. Rather than constituting pedagogical failure, opacity becomes the condition through which more ethical and self-reflexive forms of relation emerge. By making the boundaries of knowledge and access perceptible, opacity demonstrates that reconciliation cannot be achieved through recognition alone but requires sustained engagement with Indigenous sovereignty and the enduring realities of colonialism. Ultimately, this thesis argues that opacity paces and spaces the encounter between artwork and viewer, creating the conditions for more accountable intercultural relations.