Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe artist living and working in Vancouver. Trained as a painter, she graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (94) and attained a BA from Simon Fraser University in Critical Studies of the Arts (98). She is an MFA grad at Simon Fraser University (2013) and is on the Board of Directors at grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC. Born in Kenora Ontario and raised in Toronto her art explores her Ojibway ancestry and her experiences growing up and living in urban spaces.
She explains her body of work as: “My work concerns memory and expression of Aboriginal identity where materials carry social and cultural significance. In the past my work has dealt with the commodity aspect of Aboriginal culture selling an idealized First Nations body. Issues of racism and marginalization are exposed in the works presenting a realistic rather than romanticized reality for Aboriginal peoples. I reinvented typical Native objects sold to tourists and combined them with personal comments on urban living for aboriginal peoples.”
Her interdisciplinary work searches the arenas of painting,sculpture, performance and video to explore how memory, healing and ties to ancestral lands can be achieved through bodily gesture and archival images. As Vestige Vagabond, Charlene most recently collaborated with Maria Hupfield in performances at Panoply Performance Lab in Brooklyn, NY and the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro 2014 in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the US, and can be seen in the permanent collections at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver.

Check out Charlene’s work here: http://charlenevickersvisualartist.blogspot.ca