Blueprints for a long walk

Artist: Lisa Myers
Dates: THURSDAY, May 30 - Saturday, June 29, 2013
Opening Reception at 8pm, Artist talk 9pm, Thursday, May 30, 2013
Location: Urban Shaman’s Main Gallery and Marvin Francis Media Gallery
Guest Curator: Suzanne Morrissette

Curator’s Statement:
In August of 2009 artist Lisa Myers, her cousin, and her cousin’s son set out walking from Sault Ste. Marie to Espanola in Ontario. Their walk retraced the path taken by Myers’s grandfather many years before when he ran away from Shingwauk Residential School and survived by eating blueberries from plants along the train tracks.

Myers’s solo exhibition Blueprints for a long walk draws both from her grandfather’s story and reflects on the ways that her own experiences have been affected by her family history. Works included in the exhibition marry imagery from topographic maps obtained in preparation for her walk with sound and video documents gathered while present in those same places between Sault Ste. Marie and Espanola. Blueberries reoccur throughout the exhibition both in direct reference to the fruit and less overtly as the base tint for Myers’s printmaking inks. Together these works speak to the ways that memories can be tied to, and later triggered by, direct and metaphorical references to particular places and to food.

Artist Bio:
Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. She grew up in southern Ontario. Myers is of Anishinaabe ancestry from Shawanaga and Beausoleil First Nation. She cooked for many years satisfying hungry stomachs at Enaahtig Healing Lodge and Learning Centre. Her MFA research in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University investigated cultural agency and the encoding of food from diverse Indigenous perspectives, and resulted in the exhibition titled Best Before. Myers has exhibited her work in a number of group exhibitions in venues including Onsite[at]OCAD (Toronto), MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). She lives and works in Toronto and Port Severn, Ontario.

Guest Curator Bio:
Suzanne Morrissette is Cree-Métis artist, curator, and writer from Winnipeg Manitoba who is currently based out of Thunder Bay in Northwestern Ontario. Morrissette received her BFA in 2009 from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from OCAD University in 2011. Her research interests form at the intersection of different systems of knowledge, helping to question how the latent ideologies of settler-colonialism continue to inform present-day Indigenous realities on Turtle Island.

In 2011, Morrissette moved to Thunder Bay to work with the Thunder Bay Art Gallery on a two-year term with support from the Canada Council for the Arts’ Assistance to Aboriginal Curators for Residencies in Visual Arts grant. Some recent curatorial projects include Duane Linklater’s solo exhibition Something About Encounter (Thunder Bay Art Gallery, 2013), Setting: land (Thunder Bay Art Gallery, 2012), and Concealed Geographies (A Space Gallery/imagineNATIVE, 2012), which was co-curated with Julie Nagam.

Urban Shaman would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.