Catriona Jeffries

As individual artists and collaborators, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw contend with structural violence towards Indigenous relations and knowledges. Whether through architecture, video, performance, or craft, both artists gather from the practices of everyday life: song, breath, and movement, situating bodily gestures as continual actions of defiance and rebuilding.

Indigenous geometries, a central artwork of the exhibition, is a mobile and temporary structure that references the Alutiiq (southern coastal Alaska Native) homes of Lukin Linklater’s birthplace. A collaborative piece between both artists, Indigenous geometries is a modular architecture composed of spine-like curves of bent wood. Several of the wood spines lie on the floor, recalling the institutional dismantling of Indigenous social structures. The displaced spines rest in anticipation of the energy required for Indigenous communities to re-assemble languages, families, and selves. Throughout the exhibition, Indigenous geometries will be periodically activated by Blackfoot singers, asserting the connections between song, home, and resilience.

Lukin Linklater’s video, This moment an endurance to the end forever accompanies Indigenous geometries. Within the video, two spines from Indigenous geometries appear in Lukin Linklater’s home, a counter-stroke to the Canadian and US federal policies that have worked to dismantle Indigenous families. The video expands to consider the envelopes of atmosphere and gravity surrounding the earth. Structuring the video around the cycle of a single day, dancers feel the tones and qualities of their breath in the atmosphere as it expands ever outwards. Considering craft as an index of gesture and memory, Tiffany Shaw will present a new installation titled …and other unseen forces, a continuation of the title of the exhibition and its consideration of body and atmosphere.

This exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Oakville Galleries and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Curated by Adam Whitford. Documentation by Blaine Campbell.