Traces

Curator: Becca Taylor
Artists: Tanya Lukin Linklater, Dion Kaszas, Jaime Black
Running dates at the gallery: May 4th to June 10th, 2017

Schedule
May 4: 4pm till 7pm - Dion Kaszas Performance
        7pm– Jaime Black Performance
May 5: 7pm – Official Opening
        8pm - Tanya Lukin Linklater performance

Curatorial Statement:
Urban space – what is removed and what is built within an urban landscape – erases Indigenous presence. While this exhibition recognizes the strategic colonial systems of displacement in urban contexts, it also aims to acknowledge the ways in which Indigenous communities continue to exist and resist. Streets and buildings are marked by ambiguous ephemera from our actions and active existence; traces of our histories, knowledges, homes and activism are present, and leave imprints on the urban landscape. We continue to create an ongoing narrative about our bodies’ connection to the land, regardless of the concrete structures that make up cityscapes. This exhibition also aims to acknowledge the Indigenous body as a site and a method of expression, examining the physical presence of Indigenous peoples within urban spaces that are built and occupied by settler communities.

Traces includes series of performances and installations examining how our physical presence holds within urban structures, and explores the longstanding connections our bodies have to our ancestors, the land and our communities. This exhibition commits our bodies to an ideology through our physical actions and shifts the presence of contemporary art away from the urban architectural structures and towards the body.

Curator: Becca Taylor
Becca Taylor is a multi-disciplinary artist, youth coordinator and curator of Cree, Scottish and Irish decent. Her practice involves investigations of Indigenous feminisms and forms of community building through various mediums including textiles, beading and installation. Taylor also has a long history of working within the Aboriginal communities in Edmonton and Winnipeg, such as, in the position of Art Program Coordinator at the North End Arts Centre, co-organized Walking Beyond, the youth-led exhibition that took place in tandem with the exhibition, Walking with Our Sisters in Winnipeg. She was recently the Aboriginal Curator-in-residence at Urban Shaman, awarded through the Canada Council for the Arts. Taylor is a member of the Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective, based out of Edmonton, and holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design.

Artists:
Tanya Lukin Linklater
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performance collaborations, videos, and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is compelled by relationships between bodies, histories, poetry, pedagogy, Indigenous conceptual spaces, Indigenous languages, and institutions. Her work has been exhibited and performed at EFA Project Space + Performa, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago, Chilé, SBC Gallery, Montreal, Western Front, Vancouver, Images Festival + Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, and elsewhere. In 2016 she presented He was a poet and he taught us how to react and become this poetry, Parts 1 and 2 at La Biennale de Montréal - Le Grand Balcon curated by Philippe Pirotte. In 2017 she was the inaugural artist in residence at All My Relations Arts in the American Indian Cultural Corridor, Minneapolis. Her poetry and essays have been published in C Magazine, BlackFlash Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, Drunken Boat, and in publications by Kitchener/Waterloo Art Gallery, Access Gallery, Western Front, and McLaren Art Centre. Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours). She is a member of Wood Land School. She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in southern Alaska and is based in northern Ontario, Canada.

Dion Kaszas
Dion Kaszas is a person of mixed Hungarian, Métis, and Nlaka’pamux heritage and an urban Bill C-31 member of the Lower Nicola Indian band in Merritt, British Columbia, Canada. As a professional tattoo artist his artistic production is influenced by, focused on or somehow related to his obsession with tattooing. Whether he is working with traditional mediums like oil, watercolor or graphite or experimenting with mixed media collage, new media, video or tattooing on the canvas of the human body his work speaks too, from, about or includes tattoos, tattooing or tattooed people.

The stitching, sewing or poking of tattoos into the skin was a practice Kaszas’ Nlaka’pamux ancestors undertook for many reasons including but not limited to coming of age ceremonies, spiritual quests to find their spirit helper or to beautify themselves. Today he stitches, pokes, paints, draws, edits and creates so that the generations who come after him have a living, strong, vibrant tattooing tradition informed by our teachings, our methods and our imagery. As he work’s to revive his ancestral tattooing traditions he shares his gifts, his talent, and his knowledge because it is his responsibility.

Jaime Black
Jaime Black is a Métis multidisciplinary artist based in Winnipeg. Jaime’s art practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of historical and cultural knowledge. Her most prominent project to date is The Redress Project, an installation project to draw attention to violence against Indigenous women and girls across Canada. The REDress Project has been exhibited across Canada and internationally and is currently on display at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Her most recent work Conversations with the Land incorporates elements of land art, performance and installation to explore the relationship between space/place and the body, touching on themes of memory, identity and resilience.

Traces was made possible through the Aboriginal Curator in Residence Grant through the Canada Council for the Arts.

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

Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery
203 – 290 McDermot Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3B 0T2
T 204.942.2674
W http://www.urbanshaman.org/