Event

Skawennati: for the ages

Skawennati: for the ages

in The Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space

@401 Richmond St. W., 4th floor

Open Thursday, Oct. 19, 1-5pm; Friday, Oct. 20, 10am-noon & 5-9pm; and Saturday, Oct. 21, 12-5pm

This survey of one of Canada’s premier new media artists includes photographs, projections, websites and moving-image works that span time and space effortlessly. The centrepiece is Skawennati’s exquisitely crafted machinima She Falls For Ages (2017), which reimagines Creation from a very specific indigenous point of view. An early collaboration with Jason Lewis, Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Technological World (2002), also evokes the Creator, this time to give thanks for the tools of modernity. The works in the exhibition are on screens of all shapes and sizes – from iPads – Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, an interactive website from 2000 – to a funky choose-your-own-tune juke-box monitor – 80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music (1999) – to sleek digital displays – Words Before All Else Part I (2017). Seamlessly passing between the past and the future, pausing in the here and now, the bodies in Skawennati’s work slip into the permeable present as avatars, uncanny yet familiar, their memories and predictions filled with the joy and wonder of life itself.

Curated by Lisa Steele, Artistic Director, Vtape

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Born in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Skawennati graduated with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she is based. She is Co-Director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network of artists and academics who investigate and create Indigenous virtual environments. Their Skins workshops in Aboriginal Storytelling and Experimental Digital Media are aimed at empowering youth. In 2015 they launched IIF, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her work has been included in major exhibitions including “Now? Now!” at the Biennale of the Americas; and “Looking Forward (L’Avenir)” at the Montreal Biennale. She has been honored to win imagineNative’s 2009 Best New Media Award as well as a 2011 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. Her work in is included in both public and private collections.

Presented by Vtape and imagineNATIVE

Image credit: She Falls For Ages, Skawennati, 2017.