SKAWENNATI: FOR THE AGES

Skawennati (Mohawk)

Curated by Lisa Steele

Exhibition Premiere

Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
The Commons @ 401
Fourth Floor
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 450
September 21-October 21, 2017

Mon – Fri, 10am – 5pm. Fri Oct 20: 10am – 9pm. Sat Oct 21: 12pm – 5pm

FREE

Artist Talk: 8:30pm, as part of the Art Crawl on Fri Oct 21

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) that 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 Movies, 80 Minutes, 80s Music (2006) – 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

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. 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.

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