Dominic Lafontaine
© RED INK/ENCRE ROUGE, Dominic Lafontaine, 2025.
RED INK/ENCRE ROUGE — Dominic Lafontaine
Exhibition from January 16 to February 28, 2026.
Opening Reception on January 16, 2026, from 5 to 7 PM.
Artist Talk on February 28th at 4 PM
RED INK/ENCRE ROUGE is a multimedia installation that exposes the phenomenon of the Pretendian—non-Indigenous individuals who falsely present themselves as Indigenous.
The work tells the story of the Federation of First Nations Council (FFNC), a fictitious organization created using artificial intelligence. Viewers are invited to relive a pivotal day in the FFNC’s history by visiting its headquarters, where the organization produces its identity cards.
Using humor, the piece highlights how real- world groups, much like the fictional FFNC, weaponize bureaucracy to exploit the perceived "benefits" of Indigenous identity. These actors spill red ink in their attempts to appropriate "red" blood.
Dominic Lafontaine is an Algonquin multimedia artist, poet and musician. His audacious, humourous and often absurd artworks explore the very notions of cultural identity, meaning and belonging. A graduate of Visual Arts at Ottawa University, he synthesizes his knowledge of traditional art forms with new media in order to redefine the substance and visual language of contemporary native art. His motto: «Research, remix and repeat!».
© Photos by Guy L'Heureux, RED INK/ENCRE ROUGE by Dominic Lafontaine, 2026.
Writers’ Club —
RED INK: Joke’s On You
Exhibition text by Mercedeh
Written on January 20, 2026
RED INK is an exhibition for tricksters and truth seekers, somewhere in the genre of documentary-Dada¹. Dominic Lafontaine puts it this way, “The truth is somewhere in the confusion, not in being dogmatic and certainly not in preaching.”
His use of AI for surreal world-building has me asking how such a conflicting and confusing tool like AI could be used to mirror truths back to us. Whether you’re staunchly anti-AI or believe in the tech’s promised salvation, we can certainly admit that it is bringing something out in humanity. It remains to be seen if we can put our finger on what that something is before the AI bubble pops, but many people are taking swings at naming it.
Dominic comes back to the idea of AI simply as a mirror. What comes from your use of it as an artist comes from your intent. Does AI art suck and is it destroying us? Totally. Does this exhibition? I think it tries to fail in all the best ways. (And I mean that as a compliment, Dominic!)
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
– Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
RED INK hones and duplicates exactly what is so interesting about human artists: delusion. Or in the case of AI, what are called hallucinations. Every failure at reality is where art (and arguably truth) lives.
If you ask an AI to create a make-believe Assembly of First Nations, what kind of genuine nonsense does it spit out? And is that nonsense actually very similar to the mandate and documents of any real Assembly of First Nations? If so, what does this reflection show us about what is and what is not working in these assemblies? For Dominic, while they are very important bodies of Indigenous sovereignty, they’re also colonial inventions designed to hinder nations by wielding bureaucracy to interrupt land ties. Just like AI, anything can be a weapon depending on who uses it, how, and against whom.
Every time Dominic catches an absurd glitch in the AI’s writing of the Assembly’s founding principles, or in the portraits and biographies of its council members, he sees an opportunity to keep building on and looping that hallucination. Whether it’s bizarrely overqualified resumes, painfully caricaturized names and headshots, or gag member cards, art begins to imitate life. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Dominic has nurtured a dialogue of questioning both sides of Indigenous policy-making in this exhibition, which leads beautifully into the subject of ‘pretendians.’ Pretendians, a term coined by Indigenous communities, are people and institutions committing identity fraud for the sake of getting funds meant for reconciliation and Indigenous equity. The issue is steadily gaining attention as, day by day, a slew of high-profile musicians, authors, politicians, and professors are getting caught in the lie. Indigenous communities are grappling with how to define tribal belonging, authenticity, ceremonial adoption, and kinship in ways that protect their cultures from opportunists, but also leave space for those reconnecting to their tribes after Canadian policies have removed them from their birthright. Tribal councils and their criteria on who qualifies for membership have come into question, as they can also hold onto colonial ideas like patrilineal inheritance, DNA tests, and Blood Quantum.
As his process evolved and he fed prompts to the AI, Dominic started to recognize traits of his family members slowly coming out of the AI woodwork, which unwittingly led him to the birth of his uncle’s pretendian doppelganger! Dominic's tendency to not shy away from or censor the distortion of an uncle or a people gives me pause among the many existing distortions of Indigenous nations. I know I’m uncomfortable as a settler in this grey area, but my own racialized background helps me understand the power of reclaiming our distortions and wielding them in our art. When I look at how art and statecraft come together, I know that every nation first plants the seed of their legitimacy through a creation mythology. I imagine the work of storytellers like Dominic could perhaps build towards an important part of Indigenous nation-building by driving holes in the creation myth of so-called Canada and amplifying our collective settler-hallucination to its own absurd end.
I asked Dominic: How can we know where to stand as settlers in this conversation? It’s not our place to participate in it, but we certainly don’t want to naively support fraudulent pretendians. At the same time, it’s out of the question for us to scrutinize the Indigenous people in our lives. How do we interact with this exhibition as non-Indigenous people to Turtle Island? His answer: don’t take things too seriously. To Dominic, the common denominator among pretendians and non-Indigenous audiences at his shows is that they take the whole thing all too seriously. He says, “it’s a vibe” that struggles to engage with the satire, and completely misses how to “go towards the human first”.
So have fun on your visit to RED INK! Above all, the art is a jester with license to roast anyone. AI isn’t at all self-aware enough for humour, and you don’t have to be such a clanker about it either!
¹ A genre which rose out of the conversation Dominic and I had. He named each of these genres as accurate reflections of his work, and I believe they make a compelling new genre when mashed together. We thought this could definitely become a new genre in our times as we confront the wartime brain-scrambling of the Dada movement at the same time that our phones inundate us with live footage, storytelling, algorithmic manipulations, fact-checking, AI footage, and a whole other kind of brain-scrambling.
Mercedeh is an uninvited guest in Tio’tia:ke and is afraid to die. They make art from the intergalactic Silk Road and hope it leads to a revolution we all survive. When not crying in the shower, they moonlight as a whirling dervish.
Related Events
L-DR LAUNCH - Guided Tour and Presentation
Dominic Lafontaine
Saturday, February 28, 2026, starting at 4 PM
Accessibility
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming space for all.
Considering ongoing COVID-19 and flu transmissions, please note that mask wearing is strongly recommended during events.