curated by justin ducharme
Since time immemorial, indigenous people have practised careful and diligent methods to carveout relations between themselves and specific time and place. proximities: contemporary musings on place relations explores the ways in which indigenous video artists have related to space within their specific mediums and what questions arise from these almost new found forms of relationship building. Video allows selected artists narrative freedom to create non-human relations and reflect on both the past, present and future. What was Kingsway like before the fabrication of borders, neighbourhood lines and sidewalks? If the Salmon could swim upstream along lost but familiar routes, what would they see? What would our mother creator say if she could walk these urban margins? Does our existence in urban settings erase the familial knowledge we all carry within ourselves? Can we find those tactics of relating through existence in this urban landscape? Are these lost to us now? These selected works interrogate those very questions and explore the notion that sometimes all that is needed to create these unique relations is an ndn with a video camera.
Selected works:
Terry Haines, Message Sent, video, 4:49, 2012
Terry Haines, Coyote X, video, 13:02, 2013
Emma Joyce Frank, Proximity, video
Russell Wallace, Upstream, video, 2:11, 2011
Tyler Hagan, Estuary, video, 10:15, 2012
Tyler Hagan, In the Similkameen, video, 5:39, 2013
Shelley Niro, Tree, video, 5:00, 2006
Joleen Mitton, White Noise, video, 5:50, 2018