Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Michael Barber, A Silent Sky, 2022

Two standing figures face each other. A flock of birds fly above them.

Skies are usually filled with sound—birds, wind, voices—but in the installation A Silent Sky by Upper Mohawk artist Michael Barber (b.1967), they are silent, weighted with what cannot be spoken. The work brings together soaring wooden birds, a silhouetted child, and two distressed doors—each bearing the standing silhouette of a figure rendered in rust and resin, as if burned into the wood. The birds function as messengers, imagined as carrying words back to mothers whose children never returned from the residential schools. The door figures—upright, enduring—convey a grief that is embodied rather than collapsed: a presence that that refuses to disappear. The distressed doors are thresholds between inside and outside, between safety and exposure, and they become surfaces of memory as though marked by generations of footsteps and suppressed cries.

This artwork is shaped by Barber’s own family’s history. His grandmother had been forced into the Mohawk Institute in Ontario, the infamous Mush Hole, and her silence around that experience reverberated across generations, culminating in the unspoken grief that contributed to his father’s suicide. The title itself invokes absence.

Barber’s material choices are central to his truth telling. Using gouged wood, resin, and layered pigments, he creates surfaces that feel wounded and scarred, metaphors for trauma that is carried in the body and the land. His panels are shaped to appear marked by endurance, made to look like they have lived through damage rather than simply depicting it, a quality that resonates not only with his own family history but with the endurance of Indigenous Peoples after the attempted erasure of the residential school era.

Students work on a large mural on a yellow scaffolding.

A key dimension of A Silent Sky is the participatory way in which it was made. Barber often works with students and community members, inviting them to paint birds or scuff doors. This collective involvement recalls how children in the schools carved symbols into dormitory walls, leaving behind traces of their presence. The act of marking wood becomes both remembrance and repair, an intergenerational dialogue where youth acknowledge silenced histories and help to carry them forward. In this way, the work shifts from solitary expression to shared testimony, transforming silence into communal witness.

Visually and spatially, the installation transforms the gallery into a site of encounter and mourning. The layering of textures and the placement of objects force viewers to navigate thresholds, silences, and absences. They cannot be neutral; the installation demands that they consider their role as witnesses, as inheritors of unspoken histories, and as participants in reconciliation.

Ultimately, A Silent Sky stands as both elegy and resurgence. It testifies to the weight of silence imposed by residential schools while also allowing voices—through birds, doors, and collective gestures—to resound once again. Barber transforms private grief into public memory, insisting that silence itself must be heard and that art can become a vessel for truth telling, healing, and intergenerational survival.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Michael Barber, A Silent Sky, 2022

Collection of A New Generation of Art