 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Visual Art Forum speaker series. So I just want to introduce Dwayne Linklater, our speaker for this evening. Dwayne is Omoskeko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He was educated at the University of Alberta, receiving a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Dwayne attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, completing his Master of Fine Arts in film and video. You have a lot of degrees. Dwayne produces a range of work, including video and film installation, photography, sculptural objects, and often works within the context of cooperative and collaborative gestures. He has exhibited and screened his work nationally and internationally at many prestigious institutions. Dwayne was also the recipient of the 2013 SOBE Art Award, an annual prize given to an artist under 40. And he just opened a solo exhibition at Catarina Jeffries that runs through December 20th. Please join me in welcoming Dwayne. Just taking some Instagram pictures, putting on Instagram. Follow me if you like. First off, this is a new configuration for me. I usually like to do talks. And I like to sit down at a table and a chair and sort of have that table as a barrier between you and I. Now I have several things in front of me. So there's a lot of things in front of me. That's good. So first of all, I'm happy to be here in Vancouver, where there has been kind for the past week and a half. Thanks to Emily Carr for inviting me to visit with some of the MFA's today and also to deliver this lecture. So the past couple of days after the opening on Friday, I wasn't sure what to do in terms of how to do the talk. Because as I said, for about a year and a half, I had developed a sort of way to do a talk, which involved the chair and the table and the computer in front of me. And I felt really comfortable about doing that. So I feel really uncomfortable standing at a lectern making this lecture. But it's a good thing. I feel really good about it in the same way. But I really like the idea of the table right there. There was, when I was in Northern Ontario as a young person, we watched TVO, all kinds of things were on TVO. But for some reason, they used to put these programs of this man whose name was Spalding Gray. And he was some kind of poet, writer, performer type person. And he would sit at the table in the middle of this lecture hall like this and deliver these long sprawling sort of dissertations about Vietnam and things like that. Anyways, so that's sort of where I got the idea of the table. So again, back to what I was saying, I wasn't sure sort of how to deliver this talk or what to talk about. But I thought a lot about Emily Carr. I thought about this institution, the school. I thought about the context of this school. I guess I wanted to start today by telling you, when I was in my undergrad, a little anecdote or a little story about my experience in undergrad. And it relates to this. So as you can see, that this is a painting by Alan Sap. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's from Red Fesant First Nations in Saskatchewan. And he is a Cree person. And he still is very much a hero of mine in terms of a fellow Cree artist. I really had a big realization about him lately. I had a lecture and visited the University of Saskatchewan and got to talking about Alan Sap and his sort of impressions that he had made on me as a young person. And this leads to the story at the University of Alberta where I was asked in an undergraduate painting course by the instructor that the assignment was to copy a painter which you found valuable from any sort of era. And so I immediately said to the professor, I'm going to copy Alan Sap. And the professor said no. And then I objected, I, you know, I object, you know. And he said, he gave a lengthy sort of objection to my objection saying, please, you know, don't copy Alan Sap. Don't copy his work. He's brutish. I remember that word. He used the word brutish to describe Alan Sap's paintings. And I thought, well, you know, this was about 10 years ago or so. I would jump ahead to this fall when I was in Saskatoon talking about Alan Sap and had this realization of why it is that I like Alan Sap. Why do I like Alan Sap? You know, there are probably several sort of formal reasons why I like Alan Sap and several reasons, cultural reasons why I like Alan Sap. But I think one of the realization that I made in Saskatchewan in September was that his paintings, a lot of the paintings that I really like are boring. Like I think he was just sort of like, I think I'm going to paint this man by a house tending to his wood. That's what the painting was about, right? It's nothing fantastic. It's nothing mystical. It's nothing, it's nothing from a dream. You know, you just sort of painted these really boring documents of what he saw and what he experienced in Saskatchewan, in red pheasant. In that way, they become the material of them. The material is this sort of time that's passing really, really slowly. I think that's actually quite beautiful and profound. So I thought I'd start with that today and just sort of my recollections of Mr. Alan Sap and sort of, I think we share some sensibilities in terms of this idea of boredom. Am I calling my own work boring? I'm not sure. But for this part of the lecture, I think, can you hear me when I talk like that? So I thought I'd just start as a sort of survey, review of the past five years and hopefully we'll make it to the exhibition that's happening right now at Catrona Geoffrey's Gallery. We'll make it there, I promise. So this is an artwork that I did in 2009. That's me right there with the back turned to you. And that is a dog. The dog is named Pachi. The dog is from the blood reservation. The dog was borrowed from the blood reservation. And we took a trip to Calgary together. And we documented this experience together. Sort of Pachi experiencing urban life. So this is us at a dog boutique buying treats and stuff. This is us at PetSmart. As you can see, the photo of Pachi and her expression is sort of representative of the whole experience for her. She didn't really enjoy it at all. It made me feel really bad, because I like dogs a lot and she didn't enjoy it. And of course dogs have their own way of telling people things. They have their own sort of special ways of doing dog things to tell you the Saint Cool and this is not right. So Pachi did tell me that. In the end, we returned Pachi back to the blood reservation where she took off into the field and she lived happily ever after. This is a still of a video that I did in 2010. I called it, it's hard to get in my system. It's about a six minute video, six and a half minute video. This is when I began to sort of really think about the place of collaboration and the place of working with other people in my practice and sort of what that might mean in sort of investigating, working with other people in terms of in relation to making, in this case, a art video, video art. Essentially what happened in this video is that I composed a Powell song from my daughter years ago and I taught this song to Zoe. She was able to play this song after an hour interaction with her on the cello. And this also too really began my sort of investigation into ideas about translation and the role of artists in relation to translation. This, of course, is the very first neon I did in 2011. This is at a gallery in North Bay, Ontario called Whitewater Gallery. It's a small artist's rent center there. It was the first time I showed this work. It's called Tautology. There's all five of them in a row. So the source of this work is a really sort of essential thing that I have to talk to you about. The bird is an image appropriated, copied, taken from a seminal Norval Morso painting called Androgyny. This painting, of course, was hung in the Rito Hall Center in Ottawa. I just thought, well, what a crazy place, what an interesting place for this kind of a painting, for this kind of content to be and this sort of like very, very colonial, very, very Canadian sort of space where this identity is reaffirmed and very much celebrated. So I thought that's an interesting place for a slippery place for this painting to be and I guess that's sort of the norm in that room is that they do hang art in there and much of it is First Nations art. So what I did was I took this image of the bird from this painting and I gave it to a neon fabricator and created this artwork called Tautology. There are five of them. It's kind of dry in here, so I'll drink water, cough a little bit. So this is 2011 as well. This photograph is a photograph of a place, this is a photograph that I took. It's of a place called Cape Spear, Newfoundland. It's the furthest East point in North America that you can go. I went there to go see the sunrise and on that particular day in 2011, I wanted to be the very first person to see the sun in North America. This is a place for myself, it's a place of meditation and this is a place, this is a space where for me at least began a series of meditations and thinking about absence and this is very much related to the exhibition that's happening right now here in Vancouver. So of course Newfoundland, we're all familiar with Newfoundland. I was there for I think four days shooting and returning to this place and taking photographs and looking around St. John. I had known before about the Beotuck people, the original indigenous people of Newfoundland and I had a chance to also visit the rooms which is the provincial museum. They have a contemporary art space there as well and a historical art space, historical rooms. So it was there that I sort of viewed a lot of the objects and pictures and paintings of Beotuck people and began to think about them, think about their absence on this island because of course through colonial contact they were almost completely destroyed. So this Cape Spear for me it sort of represents this looking back at it now I think for me it represents this sort of place of deep meditation. So in my research about the Beotuck people I ran into this beautiful photograph taken by Frank Speck of Santu Tony and this material made its way to Vancouver and at the Orr Gallery in the fall of 2012. So my research of this beautiful old woman was revealed that she was in fact Beotuck and had fled Newfoundland as a 10 year old with her father in a covered kayak and she ended up in northeastern Maine where she as you can see grew into an amazing old lady. So she through a series of interviews with Speck who's an anthropologist, interviews and he actually recorded her singing a song that she could not remember the context for. She sang it into a, what do you call that? Wax cylinder machine. So I found the recording and I found the transcription of the song. So I took this transcription and I give it to Peggy Lee to play on a cello at the Orr Gallery. That's me documenting the event and that's a video of the sunrise at Cape Spear. So as I said, this idea of Cape Spear as a sort of beginning point for me to really deeply meditate and deeply think about absences and what those absences mean in the context of indigenous North America and sort of trying to unpack and sort of trying to understand what colonialism has done, what to do with that kind of a material for me seems like an immense sort of task but for some reason I keep returning to this idea of absence and sort of what to do with that kind of a material. So this is another component at the exhibition of the exhibition at the Orr Gallery which I called Bayotuck Building. Again, back to me driving around St. John's. I was looking for a Starbucks and I was at a sort of a stoplight and I looked to my left and there was this office building and it was called Bayotuck Building. So I thought what an incredible name for this building. So those two words stuck with me. So here, again, is a table and chair and a printed out JPEG that was sent to me via email by an artist, her name is Joanna Malinowska. So on the table are printed out correspondence between her and I. This was the photo that she sent me that I had printed out. This, of course, is her installation at the 2012 Whitney Biennial where she quote, smuggled in a painting of Leonard Peltier into the exhibition on his behalf. So the correspondence is relating to my asking of Joanna Malinowska via email, why did you do this? And so there was I think about three or four months of back and forth of sort of trying to work out between Joanna Malinowska and I of why she smuggled in this painting. The relationship fell apart. We no longer talk. But I thought it was really valuable to create a sort of position, especially within contemporary art, where for several reasons I think in terms of I asked myself this question about what is my responsibility not only as a First Nations person and an artist but what is my responsibility to other artists? What are my responsibilities to their works? And so I think this is one of the very first sort of instances of that investigation into my responsibility to other artists and the sort of problems and issues that sort of come out of that sort of questioning and investigation. So this is 2012. I planted a blueberry garden outside of Bard College, the CCS Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum. I bought the blueberries at Home Depot and planted them in 100 degree weather. So hot. For me, I think this was coming out of this this idea of language and these objects in this case, these particular objects, these berries sort of being these carriers of a particular and specific idea, of a particular and specific Cree idea. And it's sort of, of course, it's up to the person if they would like to engage with this idea, if they would like to consume this idea. So the idea being, of course, the Cree language, my language, where I come from in Northeastern Ontario, is organized by animacy and inanimacy rather than masculine or feminine. There's no sort of gendering happening in my language, but there is a sort of way of thinking of people, objects, things in regards in relation to an animacy or inanimacy. In this case, the birds, the berries being containers of this idea of animacy. So again, this is, it's up to you to decide to engage with this sort of natural thing or unnatural thing. So I was asked to do this again in New York City in a small gallery with raspberries because blueberries were out of season, but raspberries work really well. That's a dragonfly that flew into the gallery. There's the raspberries. I just dumped the dirt on the floor. We had a talk, my friend Will and I, about New York City and the nomenclature of New York City. It was attended by some people that you can see there. It's a tiny gallery, right? It was like my first show in New York. It was just like this little box, sort of the idea of this place, I suppose. It was a challenge to be there and to go there and to sort of experience a place where indigenous histories are so buried deep down into the ground that they're not often talked about. So I thought this was a really important opportunity, especially within the context of Chelsea to discuss some of these histories, to discuss some of these names, to discuss the idea of the berry. I thought it was just sort of this open window or opportunity for me to talk about those things at that time. It felt really important to me, anyways, and to Will as well, because Will on the left there, he was born and raised in New York. This is, these are stills from a film that Brian and I made called Modest Livelihood. It's a 50 minute silent film. We shot on 16 millimeter, super 16 millimeter film. It was done over two trips in northeastern BC in Treaty 8 territory. This is Brian's home territory. I was a guest in this territory. We went hunting for moose. So these two trips that were taken, they were, one was in September and another was in early December. There was approximately 10 hours of footage shot on film. Edited down to 50 minutes. An important part of this film was the roles that were sort of highlighted in the film. Of course me being this sort of guest and the cameraman being this sort of guest as well. And Brian and his eldest uncle as well sort of leading the way in the territory. So when I talk about this, when Brian's not here, it's interesting for me to discuss it because as I said, I was a guest of the Treaty 8 territory and I was recently back to the Saskatoon thing. I screened this film for people that came and we discussed this film artist I really respect attended. Her name is Lori Blondo and she's really great and I sort of was talking about the processes I guess of that one would take if one wanted to go hunting in British Columbia, which is to sort of seek the permissions and processes of the state to be allowed to go hunting. You get tickets and you get lotteries and you go through a sort of process to do it and I didn't seek that process. And Lori Blondo sort of made a really nice distinction for me in terms of it wasn't the process that I was seeking, it was the protocols. It was the cultural protocols that I was seeking from Brian and Jack. So I thought it was a really nice thing to think about in terms of me being from Northern Ontario, a Treaty 9 person and exerting a certain amount of sovereignty in terms of traveling from Ontario to northeastern British Columbia and seeking the protocols of the Treaty 8 people to be able to feed my family. So this was installed into a gallery as you can see in this photo and it was in a loop. And we made these like solar smaller films and send them back to film. This one's called Lean. It also loops on a film mechanism, a film loop mechanism. So this film was good because it was sort of talking about architecture. It was Jack's sort of design of how to build a Lean 2. He was showing us how to do this. I usually skip over this part but some recent developments, I'm gonna talk about this a little bit more. So this is in Thunder Bay, Thunder Bay, Ontario. So it's a pretty far west in Ontario. They have actually a really large collection of indigenous art. And so I was asked to do an exhibition there and this is it, I called the exhibition Something About Encounter. And it was a series of videos that I had made over two years from 2011 to 2013. This was in the spring of 2013. So the videos themselves were made from or shot with my iPhone. Whenever I would encounter a non-domesticated animal in a city, an urban place, I would take my camera out and make a video sort of of this interaction. So there's one here in Vancouver actually, two here in Vancouver, of a coyote that I encountered and I chased him. So I made a video of this. There was like nine or 10 of these sort of in a series. And then I made a series of wall texts relating to these experiences. And this artwork you see on the left, what's this sort of red dots? There's a painting by a man called Benjamin Cicci. He's, he was an artist from Bear Island, Ontario, I believe. He took his own life in an Ottawa jail cell in his early 30s. I was familiarized with his work through my mother. My mother had chosen or put up prints all around my house when I was a kid. And one of his prints was up on the wall and he was really known for these paintings of mostly Canada geese. And so there was this one print that my mom had up. It was called Learning and this is really beautiful. So I was really happy to go to Thunder Bay Art Gallery to look through the collection and I proposed to the curator, her name is Suzanne Morissette. I proposed to her, I said, can we look through your collection and collaboratively choose a Benjamin Cicci painting to be in my exhibition. And I think this sort of touches on what I was talking about responsibility to other artists again. And she said, yes, and this is the painting that we selected. I didn't know he did abstract paintings. So this is the painting that we collaboratively chose. So as a sort of side note to this exhibition, I was recently contacted by the Thunder Bay Art Gallery again, sort of a cold email sent my way and I was asked, are you the relative of an Ethel Linklater from Moose Factory, Ontario? And then I responded to the email. I said, yes, that's my late grandmother. Why do you ask? And it turns out that they hold four artworks of my grandmother in their collection and I didn't realize this while we were going through the collection months before looking through and finding this painting. So I just thought that was a really sort of interesting coincidence. So this is jumping ahead a little bit slightly to the summer of 2013. It's at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto. I did an exhibition called Learning. It is very much connected to the exhibition that's happening here right now, I think, in many ways. So I mentioned just earlier about Benjamin Cicci. That right there is a print of Benjamin Cicci that I found online and somebody printed and framed for me and sent it to me. I paid for it because my mother didn't want to let go of the one that she still has. I asked her for it, she said no. But so I had to search for this print and I found it online. Somebody printed it for me and I brought it into the exhibition. The title of that print is actually Learning. So these are the other components of the exhibition. This is a wall painting that I did which is a interpretation of the symbol for the Ontario Northland, the Ontario Northland bus and rail system. At one time it would run from Toronto all the way to Musini, Ontario, which no longer does. The former provincial government cut the line between North Bay and where I currently live in Toronto. This is an artwork called Je me souviens, which is of course a French for I remember and is strangely, not strangely, on the license plates of Quebec as well. This is sort of me, again, meditating and thinking on some absence in my own life at the time and at a very, very sort of critical time for a young man's life, which is this is the year 1990 for me and of course a very, very important thing happened that year. I had these two photographs on my wall when I was 14 years old. Oka was happening, I'm not sure if anybody here might be too sort of young to remember or not born at all when Oka happened. This is a very, very important thing. If you don't know about it, please research and read about it, a very important thing. It happened when I was 14 years old in Oka, Quebec and this is the first time that I really saw this kind of a conflict, this kind of a moment, this kind of a resistance happening not too far away from where I was living. I know that something was incredibly important was happening in Oka, but at that time, I didn't of course fully understand the complexities of why something like that happens here in Canada. An incredibly important moment for me and as I realized, this is the moment when this happened, Oka, what they call Oka Crisis, the moment I was politicized as a 14 year old kid. And of course this is the, on the right hand side is what they call the warrior Richard Nicholas captured in a moment by the photographer, a beautiful poetic moment. This sort of research into this particular picture is that both Richard Nicholas and the photographer whose name I cannot remember died on the same day in different places in 1996, six years later. And of course we were more sort of familiar with the narrative on the left. This man with the guitar and sort of what he represented, this sort of very sensitive white man from the Northwest Coast, talking about feelings and important things. But the process of these is actually really important for me as well. Of course we are all sort of accessing photographs from the internet and my conundrum or my problem I guess was how do I take these photographs off the internet? And so that was the challenge, that was the problem. And so what I did was I ended up taking a DSLR camera and photographing my computer screen with the pictures on inside the computer. So that's how I sort of retrieve these images. So here is another component of the exhibition. This is also an important sort of moment for me in terms of exhibition making, in terms of sort of bringing sort of elements into the exhibition space and sort of trying to accomplish something. And the something being sort of trying to make a constellation of materials and images and things and trying to be gentle in terms of the suggestion and relationship of these items, images, objects and things and trying to be sensitive about what it is that's coming into this space. So this is the sort of detail in the vitrine. On the left is a handwritten note by a lovely person named Rebecca, thanking me for coming to the Ontario Northland and also giving me these paper materials as well which sort of relate to how in the 1970s that the Ontario Northland hired an advertising firm to sort of create the identity for them. So in these pages, which I selected two out of probably 50, this advertising firm and its sort of tone and its sort of voice is gently letting Ontario Northland how to use these particular colors, how to configure the colors in which way to use the colors and in effect not doing this, which I ended up doing. But I thought the idea of the voice in this particular kind of an authority which sort of directs you in terms of how to compose an identity I thought was extremely interesting in relation to some of the things that I was thinking of down here in relation to my own identity and how I was sort of making my own identity at that time, at that age. Oh, we're to this, okay. We're getting there. So this is 2013. This is a picture of the Jeep I used to drive. I had this for like four or five years. I used to live at Nipissing Forest Nations and down the road was a man named Phil and we used to bring this Jeep to Phil to work on. He would keep it alive. He replaced the engine. He replaced the transmission, whole bunch of stuff. He just kept it going and going. But unfortunately it just sort of met its end. But I didn't want to, there was something that compelled me to not want to get rid of it. Not want to let it go. I don't know what that was. I still don't know. So I proposed to Phil and Phil is a very laid back, cool guy. That's him on the left. And I proposed to Phil. I said, can you take apart my Jeep? Strip everything out of it, everything and I'm gonna make it into a sculpture. And it took a long time to negotiate this. I would say over a year. Just to sort of like, first I'd tell him and I knew he was sort of skeptical and finally I convinced him. So he took everything apart, took it all out and it weighed 1,000 pounds. So before I brought it to the gallery, I brought it to another place to sandblast it and take off its skin. So there was a problem, a logistical problem with this whole exhibition. The sculpture, the Jeep, didn't fit into the gallery without them destroying a wall. And of course it weighing 1,000 pounds. I didn't want to hurt anybody. I didn't want anybody to get hurt by it. So I proceeded with the exhibition as if it would come in. But these photos here and this is the plinth or the support where the sculpture would have gone. It's like one of those moments where you're just like, what am I gonna do? What do I do? I was really scared. I was freaked out. It was about a year ago. I was really super freaked out, anxious. But I went ahead anyways. And then they were able to find a crane for me. And we decided that the Jeep should go to Barrie. This is Barrie, Ontario at the McLaren Art Center. And we put the sculpture in the sculpture garden outside. There it is, there it is. So of course when steel is not painted and treated and exposed to the elements, it begins to rust immediately. This is like two days. Last winter was an incredible winter. It was very long, very cold. It's one of those winters that's sort of unforgettable. You remember it for a long time. You're like, oh, I remember the winter of 2013. It's really cold. So this is jumping to the summer of 2014. This is last, this past summer. I was asked by Philadelphia ICA to make an exhibition for their 50th anniversary. And so what I did was I said, well, in the 50 years that ICA has existed, how many indigenous artists came to do exhibitions? So they looked for me and they said, well, Kimoan McLean did an exhibition here in 2002. I said, oh, that's very interesting. I sort of knew him, but not really. We never really met, but spoke online a few times. I said, that's really interesting. And I knew that recently he had passed away three years ago. So this was a very sensitive undertaking. So in 2002, the late Kimoan McLean went to this space, the Philadelphia ICA on the ramp space. And he made these beautiful photographs, these sort of like cutouts, and he put them into the wall. A series of them all along this wall here. And the idea was that they would just sort of remain there for the life of the gallery. And they were painted over for 12 years. And I said, well, if it's possible, if you'll let me, I would like to look for these artworks by sanding the wall down to try to find the artwork of late Kimoan McLean. So that's what I did. I went to Philadelphia and they gave me this crazy, I always picture, when you picture yourself doing things, I thought that I would just have this sander and I would just be like, like, you know, the hand sander or something like that. I thought that's what I was gonna do. But then I got there and they had this crazy machine. It was like a hybrid between a sander and a vacuum. So it was like me lifting up this like vacuum. It was really crazy, but I learned how to use it. So I mean, I think there are 13 of these sort of explorations into the wall. There are somewhere, maybe it's there. Maybe it's not, it's not so clear. I asked them to give me every project that was done there since 2003, 2002 to sort of match up the projects so that there's a yellow, this crazy yellow that's there. It belongs to Amy Silman, the painter, Amy Silman. So if I hit that yellow, I knew I had to go more. But then I thought, well, I have to be very careful. I might actually erase his work. I think that's him there, more. That's how it looks from outside. So again, this is sort of articulating my interest in this idea about my responsibility to other artists and their works and the engagement of these, for me anyways, these art histories that I deeply care about. And being able to sort of bring these ideas into the gallery in one way or another to be able to talk about these things, I think was really important. And I've done a few artists talks since this project and it seems like every city I go to that somebody there knows him or knew him. And tell some kind of really amazing story about what an amazing person he was. So now we're gonna jump again to now. So as I was saying that I was preparing sort of mentally all day for this talk. And then I said this morning I was having coffee and stuff. And I said, I should probably talk about the exhibition here. And oh yeah, I don't have any photographs of it. So I had to run down and then take pictures. So these are the pictures I took today of the exhibition. And I thought, well, where do I start? And then I remember telling Paul at the gallery, I said, you know, he asked me the same thing. He said, where do we start? And I said, let's start on the left and go clockwise. So that's what we're doing, sort of. So this here is our two separate works. This, these pink linens are one work and it's the title is Family Photograph. This is an image of a woman. Her name is Anna May Aquash. She again is, she was an AIM activist in the 1970s in the late 60s. Very, very active, very, very articulate. Very, very special. Unfortunately she was murdered in 1976 and the murder investigation remains open. Meaning it hasn't been solved. And so there's a lot of conjecture and speculation as to who's responsible for this particular murder. Again, it's myself sort of meditating on, similar to the learning works, is that myself sort of meditating on, thinking about people who have had some kind of impact on me in some kind of a way. And when I moved to Toronto in my late early 20s, I happened to get this book, The Life and Death of Anna May Aquash. I was 20 years old and I read this book and it seemed to stay with me over the years. And there was a recent New York Times article this year that sort of, what the title, Who Killed Anna May Aquash? And so this sort of brought up a lot of my, my own feelings about things. And of course, being tragically sort of relevant right now to 1200 plus murdered and missing Indigenous woman. So this is sort of my investigations into positions of that kind of an idea. This of course, just material-wise, is linens. Linens, which I found out is made out of this plant, flax plant, very resilient, very beautiful feeling material. I died at pink. I've never died anything in my life. I felt like I was really making art when I was dying this material, which is kind of an unusual feeling for me. So what I did with this material is that I sized it so that it would be only 44 wide. And it was sent through a large format Epson inkjet printer to sort of maximize this image. This image is from the New York Times article, Who Killed Anna May Aquash? So if you guys Google Anna May Aquash, I think the second or third thing that will come up is that New York Times article. So I took this photo from that article and wanted to take this little, tiny little bit of information, this little JPEG, and sort of expand it as far in terms of spatialize this image as large as I possibly could get with the resources that I had. So it ended up being this artwork. And some unexpected things happened in terms of making this artwork. I noticed that when it was split in half to sort of maximize this image of this young woman, this image was taken in the late 1960s. So she had all of this ahead of her in terms of her involvement with the American Denier Movement and Wounded Knee. But I noticed when I split it in half that it had two very, very different expressions on her face. On this left side, I found that there's some kind of, like I said, there's this idea of like, all of this is ahead of her, this life. She seems open to it and want to engage in that. On this side, not so much. So I'm not sure if I mentioned directly, I live in North Bay, Ontario. This is like three hours north of Toronto and three hours west of Ottawa. Sort of a central location in Ontario. In North Bay specifically is this place called Fur Harvesters Auction, Incorporated. It's one of the last auction houses of furs, specific for fur trappers to bring in their goods to distribute to potential buyers. And so this sort of, it's right here, it's like 10 minutes from my house. So I went there and I bought these furs. This is the work in the middle, called it Kiss. So I bought these furs. I bought Coyote, Fox, Fisher, Skunk and Minx. So the inside out is just, these are things that, for me anyways, I saw around my house when I was younger and grew up with this scent and smell and feeling around me a lot in terms of like, a lot of my family members are artists and they make things out of these furs. And in fact, I found out recently that my own family brought their furs to this particular auction house. This particular auction house, of course, with the decline of the sort of fundamental fur economy that sort of brought on the Hudson Bay Company and Canada and Rupert's land. This was the economy that sort of helped everything sort of emerge. The same place was, this very same place, my family brought their own furs to be sold. And right now that because of the fur industry sort of has declined from the once sort of great peak that it was 100 years ago. And further, the sort of business, the sort of business that it sort of, people who are interested go there are mostly Chinese Asian businessmen to buy vast amounts of furs from this place in North Bay. That's a fissure. I had to, to be honest, I had to double check the cream name of this animal because I forgot. This is the bag that was given to me from the people at the fur. They're very, very friendly, very, very nice. They gave me this bag, said, you need a fur bag. I said, okay, so they gave me this bag and then I ended up dyeing it pink. So I thought, well, like I put it on the wall and it felt really good, it should be there. Felt really important to sort of provide some kind of location and some kind of idea in terms of the origins of where it is that I bought these materials from. And there's some interesting sort of symbolism on the bag as well. This is kind of hard to read, but there's some interesting sort of ideas embedded in that particular symbol of the auction house. But back to the bag and I thought that it should be sort of activated somehow and I struggled with it a little bit. So I just ended up putting my own jacket in there. So I had to buy a jacket here in Vancouver to replace that. This is a fox and a Metallica t-shirt that my brother-in-law gave me. This is his t-shirt. This is a video of my hand that I, at the opening, many, many people asked me about. Identifying the hand is mine, but asking me why that's a coyote fur. These are linens, again. All the images sourced from the internet. Small bits of information, again. Low resolution J-Pigs. The young man on the left, his name's Mark Calls Him. I found this photograph on a website, a Tulsa, Oklahoma website, which lists and indexes crimes in the area and much of these crimes are committed by indigenous folks, such as Mark Calls Him. I thought that this photo of Mark Calls Him, he stole a truck, was particularly interesting for his tattooing of his face. Instead of tears, usually folks put tears for various reasons, something to do with the loss of somebody, an absence of somebody. Instead of tears, he put feathers. He tattooed feathers here. If you look closely at that particular picture. So I thought that this was actually a really interesting thing that was sort of reoccurring throughout the exhibition, this idea of the marking of the body and the agencies that are sort of embedded with those ideas of marking of the body. Of course, these furs were marked by a stamp. Not all of them have the stamp, but some of them have the stamp. Mark Calls Him has this sort of permanent assertion of a specific kind of identity, his indigenous identity. I actually thought the photo was quite beautiful because of that. This is called Little Ghosts, they're mink furs. The piece on the right is called Ellipses. And this is a poem. This is a poem written by Anime Akwash. That was in the New York Times article. So what I did was I took this poem and printed it out on this particular linen around 20 times, reprinting it over and over and over again. These are skunk furs. This is titled The Marks Left Behind. I really like this one. It's called The Most Beautiful Thing in the World. I like the title of it because it's a skunk. I've seen skunks around here, sort of emerging out of hedges and stuff. People don't like them. I like that, that people don't like them, right? Because they're sort of, they're dangerous, but not in a way that's like, they're gonna kill you and eat you. They're just gonna spray something at you and make you smell bad. So they have this kind of really incredible power, right? They're not, it'd be almost impossible for these skunks to actually really, really hurt you, but they still sort of represent this immense sort of power by this small little animal, sort of great. There's another shot. I think I'll end it there. So thank you for listening to me and if you have questions and comments then I'd be happy to address them. So any questions for Dwayne? I'll just give it a minute. No, no, right, David right there. Oh, okay, sorry. Thank you. You mentioned that the, in Cree the distinction is between animate and inanimate. And I was curious when you were talking about the car and how hard it was to let go of the car, whether that might have a relationship to it. Because the car isn't what we think of as an animate object but it moves and we develop this relationship with it. But I was, I'm more interested in that distinction between the animate and the inanimate if you could talk about that a little bit. Oh, sure. Car is an inanimate thing. It's, the word for that is othaban means, it could mean sled, but it's an inanimate thing. The reason why I didn't want to let go, as I said, I still don't know. Why it is that we sort of want to hold on to certain objects that we have for a certain kind of a duration. And why it is that we just don't throw them out or something and just sort of let go of that thing. I'm not sure why it is that I hung on to that. Coincidentally, an animate thing that probably a lot of us are wearing right now are socks. Socks are animate, your socks are alive. And your question about animacy and animacy is, it's sort of hard to articulate why it is the way it is. It just, for me, it's just sort of, it is. It's just a part of my life and I've been fortunate enough to have people in my life who retain that language and the knowledge of that language and I've sort of, I've been fortunate enough to talk about the language at length with these people and to sort of think about these ideas and bring them into these spaces is interesting for me and possibly problematic. But I'd like to share these particular ideas, especially about the animacy and anonymity. I think there's suggestions of that in relation to the gendering that happens in other languages. So I think that's sort of an idea that's more meant for a discussion about why that's occurring. Hi, you mentioned it briefly, but I'm so really curious about the video included in this exhibition and I guess the decision-making about where to place it and why, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about it. Oh, sure, yeah, it's, well, there's a lot sort of tied up in the hand video, I think for me it was, it sort of originated actually from a video I shot for my wife. My wife had been watching Yvonne Rayner, several of her works, and Yvonne Rayner was in a, I think it was a car accident and she was badly injured in this accident and she was not able to dance. Subsequently, she made a video or a film of her hand dancing sort of made of choreography for her hand which is this extremely, this is a very beautiful gesture. So subsequently, my wife made a video which I shot for her of a choreographed movement of her hand. So this idea sort of stuck with me for three years, four years since Tanya made the video and of course when I was making this exhibition, a lot of the works that are sort of in this particular exhibition are sort of meditations on absence again. So I began to think about what sort of absences are sort of occurring within my own body and when I was a young boy, I got my finger caught in a hood of a car and it ate it. The car ate my hand and took a piece of me away and so there's certain gestures that I had been doing since then that would sort of hide my, that particular part of my hand, that finger. So that became a sort of a departure point for a kind of a choreography for my own hand video or hand work. I think for the video in this particular exhibition, this is sort of my own way to humbly enter into the exhibition space with my own body. And in terms of its configuration, I suppose that I always, in previous video works, I always had sort of wanted to address the spatialization of film or video work and I thought, well, I've tried it in other sort of places in terms of scales and suggestions of scales as well and it never quite worked in terms of maybe not only spatializing a video but also suggesting a sculptural value of it as well. And I think for me, I was interested in proposing that again. So I think the idea, for me, of spatializing a video and suggestion that it might have sculptural sort of values for me is exciting. Yeah, I have a question that's not completely clear in my mind what the question is actually. But as an artist of First Nation background, but not from the Northwest Coast, I see a real difference in your approach to being an artist in terms of imagery and technique, et cetera. The most of the artists, not all, but most of the artists of the Northwest Coast really pursue a kind of a traditional imagery and iconography and carving techniques, et cetera. And your approach to the making of an artwork is quite unconventional in those terms. Is this been a challenge to you as you've questioned your, how you make art as an identifying as a First Nations, as an artist with a First Nation background to have to deal with that question of tradition? Has that been a challenge to you at all? Can you discuss that? Yeah, I don't think there's a conflict, not that you're suggesting a conflict, but I don't think there's a challenge there either. What was really interesting to me, and it relates to the question about the animacy and inanimacy that's sort of embedded in my language, is to these sorts of ideas seem to lend themselves really well to being in a contemporary art context. It didn't really seem like I was stretching or over-stretching to get these ideas into this space. It just sort of felt like these are really interesting ideas that I think I want to explore, that I want to investigate, and I think other people might find similar sorts of interests in them as well. It never really seemed particularly challenging to sort of recontextualize some of those really important ideas that I had that were sort of in the language or in different parts of, that may or may not be in different parts of my culture. It was just sort of, for me, I think the challenge, if there's any challenge within that, was the sort of time I needed to sort of meditate on those kinds of ideas and sort of what forms do they take? Because as you probably noticed that in the work that I don't really feel obligated to one particular kind of form, there are some forms that I'm really interested in, but I don't necessarily feel obligated to photography or painting, but I do file those particular forms valuable and the possibility of those forms really valuable in relation to some of those ideas that I'm bringing into the work. So I think for the challenge, for me, was always to find the forms, I think. I think the idea of bringing those ideas into the gallery or to the museum was always exciting. Well, the content is there for sure. It seems like the whole history of modern art and modern artists, whatever the culture, your background is, has been to free yourself from the weight of history in the past and to find a new way into the future. I sense that in your approach, you kind of lifted the weight of history off your back at the same time you respond to it. You got to reach into your own past, we all do. Yeah, absolutely, I find that sort of gesture sort of essential in terms of looking back in this idea of what I was saying a few times about being responsible to specific kinds of art histories and being able to sort of recall those art histories and sort of recontextualize those histories into being about right now. I think that's sort of why I was talking, wanted to talk at the beginning about Alan Sapp. Like I think this is a man that's been terribly overlooked in terms of like what he does and how he paints and the sort of imagery that he sort of is interested in and these sort of banal kinds of moments, but actually these banal kinds of moments are really super interesting for me to sort of think about, yeah. Hi, I had a question about an interesting conversation that seems to be developing between your work, Something About Encounter, Joseph Boy's Work, I Like America and America Likes Me, and our new MAA graduate, Jay White, with his work with Coyote Encounters. It was just, it seemed like there's a really interesting conversation going on there and I was wondering if you'd comment on that. Oh, sure. Well, you know what, that particular project was a great interest for me, but maybe not in a way in which that, and I'm glad it's on this artwork here, when I did decide to sort of research that particular artwork, the focus was not on boys, but the focus was on the Coyote and so I wanted to know the context of the Coyote, I wanted to know the history of the Coyote, that specific Coyote, and it turns out that Coyote's name was and is Little John, he was from a farm in New Jersey, also that Coyote was accustomed to people. He was raised on a farm, as I said, in New Jersey and had what they call a handler, who was the farmer with this sort of large iron rod. So not only was he sort of accustomed to a man, he was actually accustomed to a man sort of wielding some kind of tool to control him. And of course, boys going into that particular space with this, was it a crook or something like this? This object, right? To sort of wield it against the animal. And I think that, and I brought up this project too, in relation to Joanna Malinowska's Joanna Malinowska's smuggling of Leonard Peltier's painting into the Whitney and when I emailed her, I brought this project up and I said, there is an analogy, there's a connection, a strong connection between what you did with Leonard Peltier, this man that's in prison and what Joseph Boyce did, this Coyote, that's in another kind of a prison. I don't think she appreciated that criticism of her artwork, but I wanted to talk about it. I saw that there's these sort of, certainly with Boyce, this sort of patriarchal sort of relationship with the Coyote, and I would probably argue that Malinowska had a similar kind of relationship with and safety and distance to Peltier, who's still in jail right now. So that particular project by him, and my focus on the Coyote, has been productive in one way or another. And it wouldn't be productive if he didn't do it. So I have mixed feelings about that project, right? As much as I like the Coyote, right? If Boyce hadn't done it, then I wouldn't be talking about it. So it's a complicated, it's a complex relationship with that particular performance because it was meant to sort of heal, like quote, heal the wounds of colonialism, right? I don't think it did it. But again, it was productive in some kind of a way. We have time for one last question, if anyone has one. Hello, thank you so much for your talk. And it was interesting to see if we think of contemporary indigenous art. And in thinking of the question about modernism and how modernism sort of this departure from the luggage or the burden of history. And but looking at your work is that you make these historical references to many things, especially the thunderbird. And there's this cultural narrative going on. And also a political narrative going on. And all within a contemporary conceptual framework. So it was great to see your overall practice because I'm not completely familiar with it. But I'm wondering within the Cree tradition, if there's, I don't know if it's a word or a worldview for conceptual. Sure, the language is flexible, adaptable. Many of the, I think the question is interesting because I'm not sure if you're suggesting that it's not there when it's very much there. No, I think it is there. Yeah, it is there, yes. Okay, thank you so much, Dwayne. Thanks.