Casting light to fill shadow : a decolonial aesthesis in Secwepemcúl'ecw

The basis of this thesis is to link research into the physical anthropology of Interior Salish people in the early colonial period in British Columbia with the measuring and dislocating of Indigenous lands as expropriated by Settler policies in a research creation model to be exhibited as an installation and exhibition. By examining physical anthropological records, anthropometric data and ethnographic life-casts of Interior Salish people made during the North Pacific Jesup expedition (collection of the American Museum of Natural History, NY) and an Interior Chief's delegation to Ottawa in 1916 (collection of the Museum of History, QC) my research will connect the practice of anthropometric measurements with government policies of land dispossession as problematized methods of the colonial politics of measurement and survey. My thesis project attempts to locate, within the subjects of the study, a political imperative of land rights struggle through relational and installation based artworks within these conceptual paradigms. Using methods of Indigenous ways of knowing like: decolonial aesthesis, the politics of refusal and the Secwepémc concept of kweselktnéws, a culturally specific concept of relationality, grounds my research within my family, responsibility, community and territory. My MFA thesis project, Casting Light to Fill Shadow: A Decolonial Aesthesis in Secwepemcúl'ecw, will model alternative ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge(s) in relation to decolonial aesthetics. Through this project I will draw out the connections between ethnographic study, Indigenous land rights and contemporary art practice adding to the bodies of knowledge around Indigenous and decolonial aesthetics.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat

Don't Go Hungry - Be Hungry

"grunt gallery presents DON'T GO HUNGRY, a multimedia exhibition with work by artists Bracken Hanuse Corlett and Csetkwe Fortier. The artists turn our attention toward the stcuwin (salmon) as a traditional food source via process and connection. The decline of cultural harvest due to disease, climate change and overfishing has left both animal and human in a struggle to survive; the exhibition investigates this topic with new works in painting, drawing, sculpture and digital media." -- Publisher's website

Blizzard : Emerging Northern Artists

"BLIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists looks at indigenous artists working in the North who are using their traditions to forge new ideas around contemporary art. The exhibition and publication, in development for over two years, looks at the influence of Inuit and Northern traditional art forms and how these are translated by a younger generation of artists whose roots are in the North. How does the landscape and context of the North influence the visions of its young artists and how do our interpretations of that dreaming—our preconceptions about the North—influence our understanding? Curated by Artist/Curator Tania Willard, whose recent curatorial project Beat Nation (co-curated with Kathleen Ritter) just closed at the Vancouver Art Gallery, BLIZZARD looks at a younger generation of Northern Artists schooled in the traditions of their artists families, but breaking barriers by questioning relationships that tie North and South." -- Publisher's website

Olivia Whetung : Passages

"In Olivia Whetung’s exhibition Passages, an intended overlap in meaning of : a passage of text, a passage of water, and the passage of time, all relate to a sense of moving through the collected works in the exhibition. The works embody the associative process the artist uses in her pixel-to-bead grids for the translation of photographic pixels into individual glass beads that render depictions of text, water, land and sound. All works encompass acts of translation and function as associative mnemonic devices, reminders of ancestral echoes and future reverberations." -- p. [2]