SETTLER CULTURE, 150 CREATIVE ACTS
Kootenay Gallery of Art and Culture, Installation in Group Exhibition
Castlegar, BC, 2017
PRIVATE PROPERTY MAKER Found Aged Fencing (92 x 102 x 102cm) 36" x 40" x 40" gallery wall painted barn red
SETTLER CULTURE EGGERY Mixed Media: Polymerized gypsum, silk fibre, egg cartons (30.5 x 30.5 x 30.5cm) 12" x 12" x 12"
HUDSON BAY BLANKET OVARY Mixed Media: wool, paint, wire (30.5 x 40.6 x 40.6 cm) 12" x 18" x 18"
ARTIST STATEMENT
Settler Culture
For 150 Creative Acts to Celebrate Canada’s Birthday I proposed object(s)/installation that would conceptually explore boundaries and limitations of history. The work uses cloth, thread/wire/stitch, and plaster variously representing flesh, blood, and bone of physicality. I’ve been surprised at the results of my exploration.
I wanted to show the nonlinearity of history as experienced rather than as written to represent absence of certain life experiences in written history. For example, we know that women have existed or we’d not have a population. We know that indigenous peoples have lived here for at least 15,000 years yet Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World— bizarre news to its denizens. And, as Jesus and the Victorians said, the poor are always with us.
Settler Culture is visual punctuation to 150 years of creative history, which has been capable of denial, ignorance, and cruelty as well as cooperation, courage, and industry.