Claire Millikin – Time’s Doors: Duality in Gabriel Frey’s Bronze

At this winter’s Center for Maine Contemporary Art 2025 Biennial in Rockland, Maine, the Passamaquoddy artist Gabriel Frey’s bronze sculpture Ulankeyutomon (roughly translatable as He cherishes and takes good care of it) stood out as a burnished three-dimensional work that at first glance evokes fin-de-siècle art. The bronze and wood sculpture displays an Indigenous man standing between beautifully crafted wooden panels, two sides of a widely open French door. The door’s handles are intricately worked bronze sweetgrass braids, but they are not the same size, creating a duality, with one handle being very large, drastically oversized for the piece’s wooden door panels. Almost in miniature, gesturing caustically to monumentality by torquing in the other direction, towards delicacy, Frey’s sculpted Indigenous man, slender, muscular, elegant, with one hand holds forward a small well-fashioned basket of black ash wood, proffering it to the viewer. Behind his back, in the other hand, he holds a large human heart, perfectly delineated in bronze.

Gabriel Frey, Ulankeyutomon, bronze, black ash, spruce root, walnut, and birch, figure: 12 x 6 x 6 in., right handle: 16 x 2.5 x 1 in., left handle: 7 x 1 x 0.5 in., base: 18 in., (Courtesy of the artists and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art).

The entire piece works almost as a trompe-l’oeil, at first appearing to be made for the ethnographic-tourist gaze, the well-meaning multi-cultural and inclusive eye. But the clothing is only partly traditional—the authentically represented chest plate and headdress of a Wabanaki ambassador is coupled with a faux Hollywood Indian loin cloth. More forcefully, the vivid and hyperrealist human heart held behind the back overturns easy consumption of the image. The heart could be the man’s heart and, as such, it could signify the genocide of Native Americans on which our nation is founded. As Dr. King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its Indigenous population.” Artist Gabriel Frey in conversation notes that the heart is not here merely an emblem of loss and sorrow, but also of survival and joy. It is not the man’s sole heart but rather the heart of the Wabanaki people, their culture, their history, their knowledge, their strength. Despite all the threats against them, the Wabanaki people are still here. The title Ulankeyutomon (He cherishes and takes good care of it) signifies that the heart of Wabanaki culture is intact, protected, not available to be taken. Yes, the heart being held behind the man’s back evokes the reality that the genocide of Native Americans remains a painful part of Indigenous identity in the United States, all the more deeply because this history of genocidal violence is largely unseen, unacknowledged in mainstream American culture. And in this non-acknowledgement of our nation’s foundational genocide, time stands still. We do not move forward towards reckoning with and understanding our history. We leave the weight, the heart, of this painful and shameful history to be carried and kept private by Indigenous communities. But the heart behind the man’s back is not the heart of the dead: it is the heart of the living. It signifies resilience and privacy.

Frey’s sculpture engages time through its multiple vertices of symbol—the door handles do not match, the heart and the basket are mirror images but jar in the dissonance of their contrapuntal symbolic forces. The artist notes that the heart fits in the basket: it is the core of Wabanaki identity, the part kept for the people themselves, while the basket is what is offered in friendship to others. The figure suggests a man both contemporary, in the sense of made in the 21st century, and historical in the sense of signifying, with irony, the era when “Cowboys and Indians” themed sculptures and paintings were popular in mainstream America, as if they were authentic markers of Indigenous reality. In making this gesture, Frey’s sculpture subtly critiques the history of visual colonization it references. As Tuscarora scholar Jolene Rickard argues, visual sovereignty can emerge through referencing and overturning tropes of visual colonization. Notably, Frey’s bronze figure is standing on papers that signify the Maine State Constitution, which redacted provisions requiring the state to honor its obligations to the Wabanaki, and the Phips Proclamation, which called for the genocide of Wabanaki by offering rewards to settlers for Wabanaki peoples captured and killed.

Miscued temporality and temporal dissonance are intrinsic to the way that mainstream American culture interprets Native Americans. As Cherokee artist America Meredith notes there are three false beliefs that tend to govern White views of Native Americans: “Indians are historic. Indians are dead. Indians are tragic.” Frey’s sculpture ironizes and combats these time-bound misreadings of Native American history and reality. His piece gestures towards and overturns the idea of Indigenous identity as merely historic, for he presents a vivid presence that excavates the beating, living heart of Indigenous survival.

The dual time frames of Frey’s piece are elegantly articulated by the doors. With somber door-pulls of bronze that are not scaled to the size of the doors, Frey’s sculpture conveys the mystery and potency of time, time as a door we are always stepping through. The time that has been lost, the time of ancestors that is the time of the heart. The time of the self’s full expression and experience as a time pressured by colonization but not destroyed. The continued life force and cultural sacredness, and the privacy of this sacredness, is evoked by the heart held behind the back.

The heart in this sculpture looks heavy, full, as if too large to inhabit the man’s slender chest. It is a visceral sculpture, anatomically accurate to the human heart. The doors through which the man emerges, as the sculpture is presented, are time’s doors. The man is an impresario beckoning the viewer to be aware of the intermingling of past and present. The doors are eerie, surreal in this perceptual scale (large, small, monumental and miniature, disparate scales folded and unfolded in the work). The doors frame an encounter with time and history. The sculpted man steps through the doors and meets us. He does not offer us his heart, he holds it to himself. He protects it. Gabriel Frey’s sculpture articulates the double-time of survivance. It presents the sculpted man not as a commodity but as an interlocutor. What has changed since the time of the European invasion, that which is discreetly called “contact”? The Indigenous man in Frey’s sculpture stands in this temporal laches (a delay, a gap) emerging from and into the unlatched doors of this innovative conceptual-figurative sculpture. Time’s doors open here and in their opening, with their heavy brass pulls, Frey’s work conveys the weight, pulse, and fluency of time.