CONTENT WARNING: 

This exhibition includes themes of loss, grief, mourning, and substance use. 

Hǫǫsǫǫ dìik’analta’ de’ (take care of yourself).

As a way to process grief and loss, Teresa Vander Meer-Chasse has created a literal and metaphorical shelter that has been reclaimed, reconstructed, and revitalized. Having found herself in deep internal conflict following the loss of yet another family member to substance use, Vander Meer-Chase invites you to enter Nee’ Shah | Our House to witness the importance of awakening sleeping materials as a method of navigating loss. Through the processing of natural materials with her family, Vander Meer-Chasse attempts to empower you to witness universal cycles of loss, grief, and mourning.

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé reflects on the exhibition:

“Nee’ Shah | Our House began while pursuing my Masters of Fine Arts at Concordia University under the guidance and influence of my Grandma Marilyn John. The exhibition explores themes of grief, loss, and remembrance. By way of patches, I translate text I have sent to family members that I have lost or are currently experiencing substance use disorder. I do not personally experience substance use disorder; I am only a witness and a loved one to many that are experiencing or have experienced substance use disorder. Symbols, colours, and patterns that represent my Upper Tanana, Frisian, and French families and communities are present throughout the tent and act as protection, grounding, and connection. Natural materials were collected and processed collaboratively as a family and became a daily ritual in my self-growth and grief recovery.

A special tsin’’įį choh (big thank you) to everyone that has stood by my side as I grieve the recent passings of my Grandma Marilyn John, Brother Stewart Chassé, Uncle Patrick Johnny, Uncle Peter van der Meer, and Cousin Duncan Stephen.

I have been blessed with an abundance of teachers throughout my life, who share with me teachings, memories, stories, and language. This journey would not have been possible without contributors and supporters. Tsin’įį choh to my Ancestors, my family, my friends, my moosehide and fish tanning teachers, my Upper Tanana language teachers, and White River First Nation.”

Please note that the exhibition opening will be an alcohol-free event and a variety of non-alcoholic beverages will be available for free.

About the Artist:

Dineh k’èh Ddhälh kit Nelnah shǫǫsį’, nòodlèey k’èh Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé shǫǫsį’. Ts’òogot Gaay ts’änh diht’eh. Tthèe Tsa’ Niik ts’änh diht’eh. Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan dänh shih hǫǫłįį. Kwanlin dänh nìidhihshąąn. METULIYE Camosak tah huht’įįn. Shnąą Ttthìi’ Elgąy mǫǫsį’. Shnąą wunąą stsǫǫ Stsaay Ch’idzǜü’ mǫǫsì’, wunąą Nii’ii Jaiy, wunąą Laats’iih’ol, wunąą Gàan Dànihtl’įǫ. Shnąą wuta’ sts’aay Sid van der Meer moosi’. Shta’ Wilfred Chassé mǫǫsį’. Shta’ wunaa stsǫǫ Helen Chassé mǫǫsį’. Shta’ wuta’ sts’aay Louis Chassé mǫǫsį’.

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé is a proud Niisüü Member of White River First Nation from Beaver Creek, Yukon and Alaska. She currently resides on Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories in Victoria, British Columbia, although she travels home to the Yukon as often as she can. She is an Upper Tanana, Frisian, and French visual artist and curator. Her visual arts practice is invested in the awakening of sleeping materials and the reanimation of found objects that are rooted in understandings of identity. She has recently been exploring themes of grief, loss, family, community, and relationships in her installation works.

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé’s Instagram page: www.instagram.com/teresasvc

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé’s Website: www.teresavandermeerchasse.ca

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ddhalhkitnelnah

Photo taken from inside of Taathǜh courtesy of Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé and Mike Thomas.

Digitized Programming:

Creative Access Audio Tour:

Transcript: HTML (open in new tab), Plain text (formatted for screen readers)

Site map:

A PDF containing art work titles and materials. This information is also available within the creative access audio tour. A tactile map was created for this exhibition and is available in gallery. For more information, contact archives@grunt.ca

Virtual Walkthrough:

HOHOL (Hang Out Hang Out Lang) is a project presented by artists and curators Patrick Cruz and Christian Vistan with grunt gallery. Comprising a group exhibition at grunt and a series of artworks and programs in venues and other cultural spaces for the Filipino community throughout Vancouver, HOHOL gathers Filipino contemporary artists from across the diaspora and puts them in dialogue with each other and the 1996 exhibition at Plug In, ICA in Winnipeg, Memories of Overdevelopment: Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Art, an early reference and inspiration for HOHOL. HOHOL brings together these artists to reflect on their shared and individual contexts and personal histories and to continue to think through themes and questions of diasporic and postcolonial Filipino identities and practices.

Opening on June 15th, the exhibition features artworks by Christopher Baliwas, Trisha Baga, Patrick Cruz, Ella Gonzales, Ramolen Laruan, Lani Maestro, Manuel Ocampo, Christian Vistan, Thea Yabut and a text by Patrick Flores.

As an offsite extension of the HOHOL exhibition, Lani Maestro’s STILL is screening on the Emily Carr Urban Screen at the Wilson Arts Plaza, May 13-July 14, 2024. Presented in partnership with Libby Leshgold Gallery.

Lani Maestro’s STILL brings the work – originally commissioned for a poster billboard in Toronto in 2002 – into a new, digital context. Maestro’s work has often taken the form of images that become embodied in the process of reading or utterance and STILL exemplifies the artist’s inquiries into language, the body and subjectivity.

This project is made possible through funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Vancouver.

Poster by Patrick Cruz and Christian Vistan.

Digitized Programming

Creative Access Audio Tour:

Transcript: Plain text (formatted for screen readers), Google Docs

Also available on SoundCloud: streaming audio

Site Map:

A PDF site map containing art work titles and materials. This information will also available within the creative access audio tour. A 2 tactile maps are available in the space and can be used in tandem with the audio tour to guide both non-visual and sighted guests. The tour can also be used with our virtual walkthrough.

Virtual Walkthrough:

“Sora, you need to give birth to a daughter.”

Inundated by the idea that prosperity and success will come to her once she gives birth to a daughter, Sora Park’s exhibition Daughter, Daughter, Daughter at grunt gallery reflects Korean diasporic experiences through the exploration of Saju, Korea’s ancient form of divination and fortune-telling practice that predicts one’s fate based on the date and time of their birth.

Travelling between the past, present, and future, Park invites the visitors to the gallery space trapped inside a red square on her Saju chart that links her destiny to motherhood. As a happily child-free person, Park delves into how her childhood spent in Korea and her upbringing in a Korean-Canadian household where childbearing is considered a norm collide with her own interpretation of motherhood. 

Daughter, Daughter, Daughter depicts a playful perception of a fortune-telling practice and its claim that the future can seriously be predicted while revealing a tiny fraction of trust and belief in the practice that lures so many people into being participants. By applying aesthetics within Saju to her colourful and immersive installation, the exhibition at grunt gallery explores the relationship between people’s belief in the occult and the role that gender plays in predicting one’s fate.

Sora Park gratefully acknowledges the support from the Canada Council for the Arts for this exhibition. 

Sora Park (She/Her) is a Korean-Canadian interdisciplinary artist living on the traditional territories of the q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), Máthxwi (Matsqui) and Se’mya’me’ (Semiahmoo) First Nations. She received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and received her MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Bergen, Norway. In her art practice, she is currently interested in exploring the space between clarity and confusion brought on by diasporic experiences.

Image courtesy of the artist.
This exhibition is curated by Whess Harman.

Digitized Programming:

Publication catalogue:

PDF
A companion catalogue for the exhibition with curatorial text by Whess Harmon, and exhibition response by Areum Kim.
Visual description available: Plain Text, Audio.
A free printed copy is available in gallery while supplies last.

Artist Talk:

Summary: Recording of the artist Sora Park in conversation with local artist Romi Kim from January 11th, 2024. Video has English captions.

Creative Access Audio Tour:

Creative Access Audio Tour of the exhibition. Link opens on SoundCloud (external link).
Listen to a visually described tour of Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, written by Sora Park with support from Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa and Kay Slater, and narrated by Kay Slater.
Transcript available: Google Doc, Plain Text, PDF

Site map:

A PDF containing art work titles and materials. This information is also available within the creative access audio tour.

Virtual Walkthrough:

We captured a 360 of the exhibition, but only have the rights to share 5 active shows at a time. Here are stills that were pulled from the 360. If you would like to experience our 360 capture, please contact archives@grunt.ca

The video is a silent pan of the exhibition viewing the show from the south, and then a fly up and over as the camera repositions to a north view of the exhibition.

Syncretic Birthrights brings together a series of both new and previous work from painter and illustrator Odera Igbokwe. Central to Igbokwe’s work is the idea of possibility and transformation, especially for QTBIPOC communities. These works are part of a continuing collection that blend together Nigerian and afro-diasporic folklore and traditions, reclaiming and recontextualizing them into a series of syncretized paintings reflecting the many ways culture becomes harmonized within one’s identity while still responding to communal needs of storytelling and connection within art. Their paintings celebrate sexuality and gender variance in the face of postcolonial homophobia through vibrant colours, and mythological figures presented with striking grace and speaking towards an unwavering spirit of Black resilience, joy and magic.

Odera Igbokwe (they/them) is an illustrator and painter located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Odera was born of Igbo parents who immigrated to the lands of the Lenape people. As a result they are constantly excavating, responding, and envisioning in spite of the fractures that occur via diaspora. Their artwork is an exploration of storytelling through Afro-diasporic spiritualism, Black resilience, magical girl transformation sequences, and redefining the archetypal hero’s journey. More specifically, they are intrigued by Nigerian spiritualism, folklore, and sacred practices, and how that relates to contemporary communities across the Americas.

Their artwork weaves together ancient narratives with Afrofuturist visions to explore present day embodiment. It explores the magic of the Black Queer imagination, and questions how to build a home from an intersectional lens. Ultimately these works are a gateway to healing from collective and generational traumas, and assert that healing can be a celebration of joy, mundanity, pain, and fantasy coexisting. As an artist, Odera works with clients and galleries to create work that is deeply personal, soulful, and intersectional. They have created personal works and commissions for Beyoncé, Solange Knowles, Oumou Sangaré, and Dawn Richard. Odera’s work has been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology at UBC, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, grunt gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, The James Black Gallery and SUM Gallery.

Image: The Volcano by Odera Igbokwe. Courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition is curated by Whess Harman.

Digitized Programming:

Publication catalogue:

PDF
A companion catalogue for the exhibition with curatorial text by Whess Harmon, and exhibition response by Nya Lewis.
Visual description available: Plain Text, Audio.
A free printed copy is available in gallery while supplies last.

Artist Talk:

Odera Igbokwe’s artist talk. Link opens on vimeo with English captions and transcript via google docs.
Summary: Artist talk with Odera at the opening of their solo exhibition on May 12th, 2023.

Creative Access Audio Tour:

Creative Access Audio Tour of the exhibition. Link opens on SoundCloud (external link).
Listen to a visually described tour of Syncretic Birthrights, written by Kay Slater and Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, and Christina Kim. It is narrated by Kay Slater.
English transcript available: Google Doc, Plain Text, PDF

Site Map and Didactics:

A PDF containing the didactic information and layout of the works in the show. This didactic information is also contained within the audio tour and virtual walkthroughs.

Virtual Walkthrough:

We captured a 360 of the exhibition, but only have the rights to share 5 active shows at a time. Here are stills that were pulled from the 360. If you would like to experience our 360 capture, please contact archives@grunt.ca

An Insufficient Record: The photo-ethics of preserving Black Vancouver, curated by Nya Lewis, theorizes the afterlife of the City of Vancouver photographic archive concerning the history of insufficient representation of Black Vancouverites and their lives in public space. A conduit for dialogical and collaborative collecting methodologies, the exhibit intervenes with the archive, outlining a curatorial approach that identifies, contextualizes, and makes accessible reflections of the multiplicity of Blackness in Vancouver. Re-presenting and re-positioning 17 gelatin mugshots acquired from the City of Vancouver archive, An Insufficient Record malleablizes the varying vital relationships between the image and its object of representation, assessing the photographic constructions of race, the politics of human rights, identity formations, national narratives, and cultural memory. Juxtaposed within a new and speculatively valuable resource, the mugshots are presented with 50 portraits of Black and African self-identifying people, taken with clear subject autonomy, assembled from official municipal and provincial holdings, public arts and culture organizations, as well as special collections.

Challenging the insufficient depository of knowledge contributing to the historical trajectory of restricting representations of Blackness to caricature, ethnographic object, or criminal, the exhibit takes on a kind of cultural translation, examining the possibilities and structural limitations of transforming penal spectatorship to a participatory re-shaping and reading of the carceral images. An Insufficient Record exposes the strategic erasure of nuanced Black representation which enables the City of Vancouver’s insufficient fonds to exist without question or complication, speculating the role of curation and documentation in supporting collective movements beyond the public archive, visualizing and reinforcing Black personal, political, and social presence. The curatorial space making gesture imagines a system of photographic presentation and organization that engages Black Vancouver communities in the re-representation of their histories and responds to the demand to participate in national discourses of belonging, both to Canada’s past and present, readdressing historiographical challenges and their impact on archival record.

Click here to access a PDF of the exhibition catalog.

Click here to access a 360° virtual tour of the exhibition.

Click here to access a curatorial audio tour of the exhibition, written and narrated by Nya Lewis.

Click here to access a PDF containing the didactic information and layout of the works in the show. This didactic information is also contained within the audio tour.

Public Events:

• Opening and Curator’s Talk: Thursday May 19, 6pm.
• Nya Lewis in Conversation with Photographer david george: Friday May 27, 7pm.

Nya Lewis’ hybrid interdisciplinary practice is a culmination of centuries of African resistance, love, questions, actions, study and embrace rooted in the theorization of the conditions of Black cultural production. The artist sees her practice as a continuation of a long lineage of work undertaken by Black artists, curators, writers, activists and thinkers who blaze(d) a trail of critical discourse surrounding the Black experience. Lewis’ creative practice reflects upon the diversity of Black diasporic experiences and its many forms of expression. As such, she works across the disciplines of art making, curating and writing. Her work is multivalent in form and expression but is always driven by the reimagining and reclaiming of community.

Lewis is currently; an MFA candidate at OCAD University (2022 graduate), a freelance critic and lecturer published with the Polygon Gallery, Dunlop Gallery, Capture, Femme Art Review and Canadian Art. She is the Year-round Programmer at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, Guest programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Curator in residence at grunt gallery, Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, Guest curator at UBC Museum of Anthropology, a board member of BLAC, Co-director of Ref. Gallery of African Descent, and AfroQueer Vancouver.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges exhibition support from the Hamber Foundation and the City of Vancouver Cultural Grants Program.

Image: From B.B.U.N.O. (Building Bridges Untitled Number One), flyer for Soul-Resurreccion Performance Series, April 1994, Pitt Gallery. Collection of david george.

An Insufficient Record: The Photo Ethics of Preserving Black Vancouver, curated by Nya Lewis, theorizes the afterlife of the City of Vancouver photographic archive concerning the history of insufficient representation of Black Vancouverites and their lives in public space. A conduit for dialogical and collaborative collecting methodologies, the exhibit intervenes with the archive, outlining a curatorial approach that identifies, contextualizes, and makes accessible reflections of the multiplicity of Blackness in Vancouver. Re-presenting and re-positioning 17 gelatin mugshots acquired from the City of Vancouver archive, An Insufficient Record malleablizes the varying vital relationships between the image and its object of representation, assessing the photographic constructions of race, the politics of human rights, identity formations, national narratives, and cultural memory. Juxtaposed within a new and speculatively valuable resource, the mugshots are presented with 50 portraits of Black and African self-identifying people, taken with clear subject autonomy, assembled from official municipal and provincial holdings, public arts and culture organizations, as well as special collections.

Challenging the insufficient depository of knowledge contributing to the historical trajectory of restricting representations of Blackness to caricature, ethnographic object, or criminal, the exhibit takes on a kind of cultural translation, examining the possibilities and structural limitations of transforming penal spectatorship to a participatory re-shaping and reading of the carceral images. An Insufficient Record exposes the strategic erasure of nuanced Black representation which enables the City of Vancouver’s insufficient fonds to exist without question or complication, speculating the role of curation and documentation in supporting collective movements beyond the public archive, visualizing and reinforcing Black personal, political, and social presence. The curatorial space making gesture imagines a system of photographic presentation and organization that engages Black Vancouver communities in the re-representation of their histories and responds to the demand to participate in national discourses of belonging, both to Canada’s past and present, readdressing historiographical challenges and their impact on archival record.

Public Events:

• Opening and Curator’s Talk: Thursday May 19, 6pm. Registration is required, click here to register.
• Nya Lewis in Conversation with Photographer david george: Friday May 27, 7pm. Registration is required, click here to register.

Nya Lewis’ hybrid interdisciplinary practice is a culmination of centuries of African resistance, love, questions, actions, study and embrace rooted in the theorization of the conditions of Black cultural production. The artist sees her practice as a continuation of a long lineage of work undertaken by Black artists, curators, writers, activists and thinkers who blaze(d) a trail of critical discourse surrounding the Black experience. Lewis’ creative practice reflects upon the diversity of Black diasporic experiences and its many forms of expression. As such, she works across the disciplines of art making, curating and writing. Her work is multivalent in form and expression but is always driven by the reimagining and reclaiming of community.

Lewis is currently; an MFA candidate at OCAD University (2022 graduate), a freelance critic and lecturer published with the Polygon Gallery, Dunlop Gallery, Capture, Femme Art Review and Canadian Art. She is the Year-round Programmer at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, Guest programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Curator in residence at grunt gallery, Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, Guest curator at UBC Museum of Anthropology, a board member of BLAC, Co-director of Ref. Gallery of African Descent, and AfroQueer Vancouver.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges exhibition support from the Hamber Foundation and the City of Vancouver Cultural Grants Program.

Image: From B.B.U.N.O. (Building Bridges Untitled Number One), flyer for Soul-Resurreccion Performance Series, April 1994, Pitt Gallery. Collection of david george.

Smokes, Sings Loud
By Lori Blondeau and Michelle Sound
February 4th—March 12th, 2022
Curated by Dan Pon, Whess Harman and Vanessa Kwan
Artist Talk: February 24th, 6pm PST, online

Smokes, Sings Loud celebrates the wit, wisdom, and warmth of NDN Aunties through the work of Lori Blondeau (Cree/Saulteaux/Métis) and Michelle Sound (Cree and Métis), two artists whose work draws from and feeds back into deep and embodied community connection. Featuring Blondeau’s 1999 performance work Bleached, and Sound’s Deadly Aunties series from 2021, the exhibition looks across time and relations to make connections between the fierce, close care among kin with meaning in the wider world: that this love, in all its toughness, humour and tenderness, is also resistance.

Chosen family and ‘art aunties’ to so many, Blondeau and Sound make work that celebrates the matriarchs in their lives, a continuum of which they themselves are part of. Together they have done much to create possibilities and guide their communities,  keeping their kin out of the bad trouble—and nudging them into the good kind.  As a resistant (reluctant?) archetype, Auntie shows you the way from an early age, they teach you how to be tough as leather and soft as rabbit fur. When you think you know everything there is to know they put you in your place with a side-eye or a one-liner, and then they generously teach you more. In this spirit, Smokes, Sings Loud presents new and archival works that speak across generations, with razor-sharp wit and style to match.

Pairing a contemporary sculptural textile practice with performance from the grunt archive, the exhibition considers meaning in memory: how a piece of fabric, a pattern, a song, or a smell might evoke a story or a feeling with no beginning or end but that is no less telling for it. Blondeau’s Bleached reminisces on matrilineage, internalized racism, and nitpicking get-togethers with touching sentimentality and astringent humour. Sound’s Deadly Aunties series is a material homage to auntie’s closet: buckles, fringe, and big cat prints on fierce fits for a night out or a run to the gas station for smokes. Sharing space, these works invite one into the sphere of the bold domestic, and offer a chance to reflect on and pay respect to those who looked out for you. Here, struggle transforms, shines bright.

Click here for a PDF of the exhibition catalog.

Click here for an audio description of the visuals in the exhibition.

Click here for the exhibition floorplan.

Michelle Sound is a Cree and Métis artist, educator and mother. She is a member of Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation in Northern Alberta. Her mother is Cree from Kinuso, Alberta, Treaty 8 territory and her father’s family is Métis from the Buffalo Lake Métis settlement in central Alberta. She was born and raised on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University, School for the Contemporary Arts, and a Master of Applied Arts from Emily Carr University Art + Design. Michelle is currently an Indigenous Advisor at Douglas College and has taught workshops as a guest artist at the Richmond Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery.

She has exhibited her artwork in Moving Throughlines (Seymour Art Gallery) and Winter Pandemic (SoLA Contemporary Los Angeles). Public art pieces include a utility box art wrap for the City of Vancouver and a painted mural exhibition in Ottawa (2018) nākateyimisowin/Taking Care of Oneself, Curated by Joi Arcand. Michelle was a 2021 Salt Spring National Art Award Finalist and has upcoming exhibitions at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, Neutral Ground ARC (Regina) and Daphne Art Centre (Montréal).

Lori Blondeau is Cree/Saulteaux/Métis from Saskatchewan, Canada. Since the 1990s, Blondeau’s artistic practice in the fields of performance, photography and installation, along with her curatorial work and activities as co-founder and Executive Director of the Indigenous art collective TRIBE, has proved decisive to the ever-increasing centrality of Indigenous art and knowledge production in Canada. With her performances, which include Are You My Mother? (2000), Sisters (2002) and States of Grace (2007), and photographic work, including COSMOSQUAW (1996), Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997) and Asinîy Iskwew (2016), Blondeau’s practice both as a solo artist and in collaboration with fellow visual artists demonstrates a clarity of focus which is remarkable for its precision, humour and strength. Her photographic and installation work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions. Her performance pieces have been showcased at Nuit Blanche (Saskatoon and Winnipeg), VIVO (Vancouver), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and the 2007 Venice Biennial. Blondeau has participated in panel discussions and given lectures at the AGO, the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe) and the 2020 Sydney Biennale. Since 2018, Blondeau is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Art at the University of Manitoba School of Art. Blondeau was a recipient of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Image: Michelle Sound, Deadly Aunties, 2021. Image by Dennis Ha.

Tsēmā Igharas: Black Gold
Curated by Natasha Chaykowski

As more than 12,000 square kilometers of land—forests, grassy expanses, life—burned within the unceded territories now known as British Columbia, the east moving wind from the Pacific Ocean pushed the ensuing smoke across the Rockies, shrouding Alberta in darkness. As the smoke wafted eastward, millions of barrels of heavy crude were pumped westward: the movements of black gold.

Black Gold, a project by Tahltan artist Tsēmā Igharas, approaches mining practices and the indisputably thriving yet destructive extractive industries in the colonial states of British Columbia and Alberta, particularly within the context of Athabasca oil sands. This project takes for start the idea that mined substances are inherently connected to our bodies through a shared geological origin. The energy of a molecule is the energy of a person is the energy of a place is the energy of a moment.

In Summer 2018, Tsēmā investigated these tensions through site-specific research and a residency supported by Untitled Art Society, which allowed her to delve into how these issues are made manifest on Treaty 7 Territory and Treaty 8 Territory, in comparison to how mining industries exist culturally, historically, politically and economically in the unceded lands of the artist’s home territory, Tahltan First Nation in northwestern British Columbia.

The exhibition floorplan can be found here as a PDF.

Image: Tsēmā Igharas, Black Gold, grunt gallery, 2021. Photo by Dennis Ha.

The gallery closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic before this exhibition was finished. We were saddened not to be able to share this exhibition with you in person, however we created a virtual tour video of the exhibition, and the publication is available here: pi’tawkewaq_our people up river_Musseau_grunt gallery

For her first solo exhibition in Vancouver, Meagan Musseau presents a body of work from her ongoing research responding to Beothuk and Mi’kmaq visual culture. Musseau uses a multi-disciplinary practice that involves archival research, land-based action, video, drawing, and sculpture to explore land, language, and design. By telling stories about cultural belongings from the perspective of a contemporary L’nu woman living on Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), Musseau’s work transfers knowledge from archived collections into contemporary visual consciousness.

A braided sculpture made during a land-based action in Musseau’s home region of Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands, NL) forms the physical and conceptual center of the exhibition. While the act of endurance required to create the 22 foot braid connects to stories and nomadic histories of the Mi’kmaq, the object itself carries the history of the land in its creation. A series of tall sculptures rendered in engraved plexiglass reference Beothuk caribou bone pendants that Musseau visited during museum research. Evoking the artist’s experience of visiting cultural belongings through plexiglass cases, the sculptures re/awaken their designs by enlarging them to a human scale and presence. A site specific wall installation integrates the material qualities of the braid with graphic elements from the pendant designs. These textures surround an image of Musseau beside one of Santu Toney, a woman living in the early 1900s with mixed Mi’kmaw and Beothuk ancestry. Musseau’s work seeks to honour Santu by highlighting the transmission of knowledge that exists between past, present, and future generations.

pi’tawkewaq | our people up river presents contemporary cultural belongings that index and render tangible Musseau’s active practice of building and maintaining her relationships to land and ancestor artists. She uses her perspective to overturn colonial narratives of disappearance and instead addresses the role of interterritorial relationships between the two nations as a guiding methodology.

This exhibition received support from the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. The artist would also like to acknowledge Grenfell Art Gallery and the Makerspace in Corner Brook, NL.

Meagan Musseau is an L’nu artist from the Mi’kmaq Nation. Her practice is rooted in Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk territory (Bay of Islands, Western Newfoundland) and extends to other areas of Mi’kma’ki and Wabanaki territory. Musseau nourishes an interdisciplinary practice by working with customary art forms and new media, such as basketry, beadwork, land-based performance, video and installation. She focuses on creating artwork, dancing, learning the Mi’kmaw language, and facilitating workshops as a way to actively participate in survivance. Her work has been exhibited at AKA artist-run centre, Saskatoon; Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s; VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; and Kelowna Art Gallery, among others. She has been supported by numerous awards, and featured in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and Visual Arts News. Meagan is working towards solo exhibitions at TRUCK Contemporary Art Gallery (Calgary 2020) and Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre (Edmonton, 2020/21).

Laurie White is a curator and writer from Sheffield, England. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her thesis exhibition project at Or Gallery, We Built a House Out of the Things We Had Gathered, explored salvage and bricolage as modes of ecological practice in contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions at the fifty fifty arts collective, Victoria; AHVA Gallery, UBC; and Western Gallery, Bellingham. She co-edited the catalogue Beau Dick: Devoured by Consumerism (Figure 1 Publishing) for Fazakas Gallery and her writing will appear in the forthcoming catalogue, Beginning with the Seventies published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Laurie is currently the Assistant Curator at the Or Gallery.