The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by artist Krista Belle Stewart
Motion and Moment Always
January 23 to February 15, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, January 22, 7-10pm.
Stewart’s practice reclaims personal and cultural narratives from archival material, situating them in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous discourse and engaging the complexities of intention and interpretation. Within this reframing of documents, Stewart’s new installation considers First Nations women’s self-representation and sovereignty. Central to the exhibition is an ongoing project, a bucket filled with distinctive dried clay from land owned by Stewart on the Douglas Lake reservation, and passed down to her from her mother’s family. Not only is this a physical connection to her heritage but also a poetic response to the continued dispossession of First Nations women’s land rights.
Working with her own personal stories and those of the women she met in Nisga’a, Stewart investigates how cultural knowledge is created and exchanged, weaving together new lens-based works with archival photographs and objects from the Nisga’a Museum. These include an image originally shot by Benjamin Haldane, a Tsimshian photographer from Alaska, picturing a Nisga’a woman in a full chief’s regalia surrounded by men dressed in traditional and western clothing. Typical of his work, it offers an example of First Nations self-representation, a counter to the more usual colonial-settler’s gaze.
There is a kinship between Haldane’s and Stewart’s practices through the production of complex and diverse documents of First Nations self-representation. Within this Stewart infiltrates narratives of colonial culture and reasserts connections to pre-colonial traditions while considering the tensions present between institutions as colonial support structures and as living entities shaped by the community they represent.
Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College in New York. At Western Front, Stewart produced a collaborative multimedia performance working with, circa 1918, wax-cylinder recordings by anthropologist James Alexander Teit of her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko. Most recently, Stewart was commissioned by the City of Vancouver as part of the “Year of Reconciliation,” Public Art Project where Her Story (2014), a public photo mural and video installation, utilized footage of a 1967 CBC documentary entitled Seraphine: Her Own Story, a scripted interpretation of her mother’s journey from residential school to becoming BC’s first Aboriginal public health nurse. This work was also exhibited in Where Does it Hurt? at Artspeak (2014). Stewart juxtaposes the 1967 film, in which her mother plays herself, alongside a video of her mother’s 2013 Truth and Reconciliation Commission interview, generating a conversation between depiction and lived experience.
Screening and Talk- Krista Belle Stewart Western Front, 303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver Thursday, January 29, 7pm