b'As a subject, Drever has subjected the bear to an intriguing evolution. Drever is a member of the Haida Nation, a status that was recognized in 1999 (as early as 1994 he had been accepted as a member of the Mtis Nation of Alberta). His father was Haida and had been sent from Vancouver Island to a residential school in Fort QuAppelle, Saskatchewan. In West Coast art generally, and particularly in Haida culture, bears hold a special place; they are supernatural creators and their con-stant shifting back and forth between the animal and the human world is common-place in Haida stories. That narrative of transformation fit perfectly Drevers casting of himself and his partner inside the skin of the bear as a way of declaring a story of their own, this one about commitment and love.-What is interesting is that his first encounter with the bear wasnt through culture but through experience. From 1989 until 1995 he worked as a tree planter in coast-al areas in British Columbia and bears were commonly sighted in that environment. It was there that he began to observe how they reacted to the presence of humans. Bears are extremely docile and are only aggressive under very specific circum-stances. They have no interest in you unless theyre short on food and even then they dont want to eat you; youre just not funky enough. There were many times when we would be eating our lunch and a bear would walk by, look at us, and keep on going. So I dont know where the idea of the big bad bear came from. (1) Drever has had different arrangements of bears on his mind for almost 30 years. The animal fell into what is for him a consistent relationship between idea and exe-cution. When I cant find something that I really like, I go ahead and make it. The things that I want to see are usually quite simple and pared down, and it is hard to findthatkindofthing.Youcaneasilyfindsomethingthatgoestheotherway towards the maximalist. Let me put it this way; there was a bear in me that I wanted to see and it progressed from there. His first realization was in Toronto in 2008 at MKG127 called Bear Minimum. The exhibition included one large Yellow Kodiak, (it was 13 feet long and 5 feet high and made from EPS, fiberglass and flock). The pun on minimum in the show title was a reference to the second sculpture in the gallery, Yellow Kodiak (front), in which only the head and a paw of the bear protrud-ed from the wall. It was as if Robert Gober was the exhibitions zookeeper. 17'