About Urban Shaman

*Above image Urban Shaman as it pretty much is today at 290 McDermot Ave location

MISSION STATEMENT
Urban Shaman is an Aboriginal artist-run centre dedicated to meeting the needs of artists by providing a vehicle for artistic expression in all disciplines and at all levels by taking a leadership role in the cultivation of Indigenous art.

VISION
Urban Shaman presents contemporary Indigenous Aboriginal art with integrity while remaining rooted in our diverse Aboriginal cultures.

MANDATE
Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art is a nationally recognized leader in Aboriginal arts programming and one of the foremost venues and voices for Aboriginal art in Canada. Our focus on developing new programming and new ways of presenting it have resulted in increased exposure and the expansion of our activities. Urban Shaman is dedicated to the Aboriginal arts community and arts community at large.

• Committed to serving the needs of emerging, mid-career, and established Aboriginal artists through exhibitions and associated programming, workshops, residencies and curatorial initiatives.
• Dedicated to contributing to art historical and cultural critical discourses on a local, national, and international level.
• Committed to facilitating artistic production, education, and appreciation of contemporary art as an important and empowering tool for Aboriginal peoples.

Admission to the gallery is free.

Roots Above Branches

Artist Statement
Roots Above Branches is a collective of five recent University of Manitoba - School of Art Indigenous graduates from the BFA honours program. Our name, Roots above Branches, references to both our shared use of tree branches and other natural materials in our individual practices. It also references the nature of some Indigenous languages wherein the order of the words does not matter in conveying meaning, we felt that this allows us to reference multiple Indigenous languages as we all come from varied backgrounds. This upcoming show incorporates everyone utilizing naturalistic materials with a sense of grounding and earthing. It will explore themes of identity, our individual perspectives, and our connection to the land. Roots Above Branches highlights the importance of where we come from and the cultures we are born into.

Biographies
Robyn Adam’s connection is to craft tactility and connecting to her ancestors in Canada who identify as being Métis. Exploring relationship from construction materials like concrete with raw natural animal remains like bones, leather and fur she explores hybridity in pursuit of decolonization.

Niamh Dooley is an Oji-Cree and Irish contemporary artist based in Winnipeg. She’s a band member of St. Theresa Point First Nation in Treaty 5 territory of Manitoba, but grew up in Treaty 3 territory in Sioux Lookout, Ontario. She predominantly focuses on the exploration of identity, cultural issues, and her interest in the relationships between Indigenous people, past and present, and connecting them with both traditional and contemporary materials in her art practice.

Danielle Fenn is a white presenting Métis woman of Scottish-Cree, English and Irish ancestry. She lives and works in Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba where she was born and raised. Fenn’s work explores notions of ground and the feeling of being grounded, formally and in relation to identity, women-hood, and the sacred.

Kristin Flattery is a contemporary Dakota and Anishinaabe artist and mother from Long Plain First Nation, Treaty 1 Territory. As a radical Indigenous political activist, her artwork embodies a performative story-telling nature, regarding our relationship and connectedness to the land and exposing the profound effects of colonialism, reclaiming Western spaces and our Indigenous Identities through the discourse of Aboriginal Sovereignty. What will the next 150 year look like for Kanata?

Sarah Stewart is a Métis interdisciplinary artist working in installation, sculpture, video and design from Winnipeg, MB. Her work often utilizes found objects and materials, thematically she is interested in creating work that explores themes of communication, growth/stagnation, in-between states, and strange spaces.

Special Thank you to University of Manitoba School of Fine Arts, The Gail Asper Family Foundation Inc.

Urban Shaman: Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery acknowledges the support, throughout the year, of our friends, volunteers, community and all our relations, NCI FM, Wawanesa Insurance, the Winnipeg Arts Council, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts.  ~MIIGWETCH / HAI HAI

Transformations: Terril Calder’s Animated Worlds

Terril Calder’s Animated Shorts
Friday, May 11 @ 7pm
The Cinematheque Arthur Street

Introduced by Terril Calder.

One of the most important animation artists in Canada, Terril Calder is a hugely talented Métis artist and stop motion animator now based in Toronto. Her films have won awards and played at film festivals around the world from Sundance to imagineNATIVE and Berlin. As one of Canada’s leading stop-motion animators, Terril Calder has crafted a remarkable body of work informed by her Métis ancestry and by her background as a performance and visual artist. With strong roots to Winnipeg – where she studied and practised – Terril’s gritty, visceral animations speak to a unique perspective that explores layers of identity, history and personal and shared transformation. This screening is the first-ever retrospective of Terril’s short animations, which includes Choke co-created by Michelle Latimer and Transformation, created as segment of Travelling Medicine Show, a feature film by Amnon Buchbinder.  A former student at the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Art, she was also a member of the notorious Winnipeg art collective, the Student Bolshevik group. Calder creates gorgeous hand crafted stop motion animated shorts expressing strong First Nations thematic concerns. Her work has strongly influenced many Indigenous filmmakers and a new generation in film; Spotted Fawn (aka Amanda Strong) and Michelle Latimer were both mentored and/or assisted by Terril in their animated work. The film Choke won an Honorable Mention at the Sundance Festival and Berlin and Terril has twice made TIFF’s top ten list of the best shorts of the year.

“My inspiration has always come from my interest in understanding my place in the world and to translate my journey into artistic expression. Creativity & invention are my inspiration. My life’s purpose is to inspire others to think creatively and not to just accept old conventions as norms but to challenge them if they no longer make sense.”
- Terril Calder

Canned Meat
2009, Canada, 28 min
Directed and Animated by Terril Calder
Terril Calder’s film Canned Meat serves up an animated tale of a rotting beauty queen who attempts to
preserve her youthful image by sealing herself up in a Silverline Trailer.

“Calder’s film, Canned Meat, was a jarring and beautiful film that spoke to themes of isolation, memory, and community.”
-Tracing Memory

Choke
Directed by Michelle Latimer
(Co-created and animated by Terril Calder)
2010, Canada, 5:35 min
Upon leaving his First Nations reserve, Jimmy encounters the lost souls of the city and is reminded that no matter how far you travel, you cannot escape who you are.

*Sundance Film Festival (Special Jury Honourable Mention - Best International Short Film),
*Toronto International Film Festival, Canada’s Top Ten Short for 2011

The Gift
Directed by Terril Calder
2011, Canada, 2 min
The “Gift” is an exploration of betrayal and deception wrapped in a cozy blanket infested with the small pox disease.

Vessel
Directed by Terril Calder
2013, Canada, 1 min
Commissioned by Cinema Zuid, Netherlands One Minute Film series
Vessel explores the hollowness of vanity.The pursuit of fame and visibility within our contemporary culture leaves people scrambling for answers before they are asked. To brand them to the market for mass consumption and to iron out attributes within their personality that might mar their market value. It is a contradiction to my Aboriginal teachings as we are taught that humility is one of the seven sacred lessons. That vanity is a path to emptiness.

”...its eerie, unsettling atmosphere will stay with you for a long time.”
- Alison Gillmor, Winnipeg Free Press

Repercussions
Directed by Terril Calder
2013, Canada, 3:45 min
Vibrations still resonate from the lands past. If you paid full attention you can hear the history underfoot. Toronto has always been a gathering place for the interchange of knowledge, experience and goods. It has a rich history of those traditions and remains to be rich because of those traditions. Repercussions is a portal that examines the link aboriginal people have to the lands history and resonates into a future that is strengthen by this acknowledgement.

“A simple yet incredibly fascinating short that exposes the true magic of stop-motion animation…Wonderfully crafted….compelling…Electric Pow Wow” by A Tribe Called Red truly gives the piece a unique identity.”
- The Arts Guild Magazine

Transformation (From The Travelling Medicine Show 3)
Co-Directed and animated by Terril Calder
2014, Canada, 4:51 min
Transformation is a short animation that is featured in the film Traveling Medicine Show 3 that was directed by Amnon Buchbinder. First his cat got run over by a car. Then he had a near-fatal bout with cancer. Then his marriage ended. Now, filmmaker Amnon Buchbinder is trying to put his life back together and find a publisher for his novel. But when an ominous diagnostic result suggests that cancer may be back, he must find the medicine hidden somewhere between his art and his life.

Snip
Directed by Terril Calder
2016, Canada, 15 min
Snip examines the reclamation of history, literally ‘snipping’ it out of past colonial ideologies. Through the stories of Charlie and Niska, two children caught in the residential school system, and Gorden and Annie, two urban Aanishinaabe, the film’s ever shifting gaze moves into an indigenous perspective.

Keewaydah
Directed by Terril Calder
2017, Canada, 9:34 min
In 1966, Canada’s first inquest into the treatment of First Nations children in residential schools took place. The hearing emerged from the tragic death of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinabe boy who ran away from an abusive school and froze to death alone in the bush. Decades later Chanie’s legacy endures.

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The Lodge
Directed by Terril Calder
2014, Canada, 73 min

Saturday, May 12 @ 7 pm
The Cinematheque Arthur Street

Introduced by Terril Calder (above image from The Lodge)

The Lodge is a stop-frame animated fairy tale set in the Canadian wild. War bride, Pearl Simpson, born in the slums of England, yearns to rise up from the Animals that co-inhabit her new world to reign as their Queen. However the Manitous have something else in mind. The Lodge” weaves together an English fairy tale, “The (Original) Three Bears” and the Anishinaabe story of the Dandelion. The lead character Pearl Simpson was inspired by Canada’s “Little Emperor”, George Simpson (1787-1860) as both longed for power and control. Unfortunately their damaged perspective needlessly brought suffering to many Indigenous people around them.