The final iteration of a series of artist residencies at the Herschel Supply Company’s flagship Vancouver location will feature artist and ECU student Nevada Lynn.

Nevada will hang screen-prints of Douglas Fir tree rings from her series Douglas Fir/Srap7úl inside the glass-walled room within Herschel’s Gastown store. The images, which each include a land acknowledgement, can be seen through the sheer muslin on which they were printed, Nevada notes.

“By putting a land acknowledgement on each one of these pieces, I’m asking, how can we integrate these words into our everyday lives? And what do they actually mean?” Nevada says. “What’s my responsibility as a guest on traditional land? And what does that look like on a day-to-day basis?”

The Herschel Artist in Residence program was developed in partnership with both the Career Development + Work Integrated Learning office and the Advancement office at Emily Carr University with the goal of exhibiting the work of three emerging artists over the course of 2023 and 2024. The first edition was an open call for all ECU students; the second was specific to BIPOC students; the third was specific to Indigenous students. Karl Hipol was the inaugural resident, while Hannah Watkins was the second. Each recipient has their work exhibited for a period of roughly three months and receives a $4,000, no-strings-attached stipend.

Nevada, who is of Cree Métis and European ancestry, says Douglas Fir/Srap7úl is rooted in her experience of living on Alpha Lake, on the unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nation and Lilwat7úl (Lil’wat) Nation. As part of a six-year recovery from a serious head injury, Nevada plunged into the lake’s icy waters for 365 days. As she healed and became more connected to the land, she began to wonder who its original caretakers had been.

Through her mother-in-law, she connected with a Lilwat7úl Elder residing in Mount Currie who had lived on a small island in the middle of the lake for a time as a child. During the visit, Nevada recalls asking her son what it was like when they lost their land.

“His answer was, ‘We never lost our land. It’s still our land,’” she tells me. “And then he told me the Whistler gondola runs through his uncle’s trapline. Displacement for Indigenous peoples is not ancient history. It’s still happening.”

As the final recipient of the 2023/4 Herschel residency, Nevada notes that Indigenous-specific funding can be “life-changing” for Indigenous artists.

“These artists are representing whole communities,” she says. “They don’t want to just be successful for themselves. They want to speak to issues that are really meaningful and urgent. That responsibility is driving their work. These kinds of grants are making a big difference in the lives of Indigenous artists, and Indigenous artists are affecting real change.”

Read the full article on ECU News.

Participating in protests against logging old-growth trees on Vancouver Island is about more than protecting forests, Naas tells me. For Naas (a camp alias being used by request), standing with protesters at Fairy Creek is about defending a vision of a sustainable, equitable future, where social and political norms prioritize people and place, instead of profit.

“Ultimately the way to achieve that future is recognizing and respecting Indigenous law and land sovereignty,” Naas says, “The First Nations are the original caretakers of this land and if there is to be hope of recovery, we must allow Indigenous land stewardship to resume.”

Naas, a Two Spirit artist and ECU student currently between his first and second year, is from the Hesquiaht First Nation. As of May, he has been serving as a camp cook on the frontlines of a fight to preserve one of the last stands of ancient trees in British Columbia.

For nearly nine months, protesters at what is broadly known as the Fairy Creek Blockade have been blocking logging company Teal-Jones from accessing a number of stands of old-growth forest in a remote region of southwestern Vancouver Island. Occupying strategic locations in camps along logging roads and on bridges near Port Renfrew, the groups have prevented fallers from accessing the Caycuse watershed to harvest the trees, many of which are hundreds or even thousands of years old — trees that protesters say represent less than three percent of remaining old growth in the province.

And by some accounts, the pressure may be working. On June 9, the BC government announced it is deferring the harvesting of old-growth trees in Fairy Creek and the Central Walbran Valley for two years. The move came following a request from the Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht and Pacheedaht First Nations to defer old-growth logging while they prepare stewardship plans. But the deferral represents only a start to the work Naas hopes the blockade might accomplish.

“These protests really represent a huge push for recognizing toxic systems, and recognizing we need change, even if it seems impossible at this point in time,” he says. “Because if we don’t change — if we don’t confront extractive resource practices and this idea of working-to-live — there’s not going to be anything left.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/ecu-student-on-frontlines-of-fairy-creek-protests-says-blockades-are-a-battleground-for-a-sustainable-future

Speaking with artist Preston Buffalo, it quickly becomes clear his life and work are fiercely resistant to definition. And that’s just the way he likes it.

“If somebody can’t put a label on you, it’s really uncomfortable for them,” he tells me by phone from his 200 square-foot live-work space in Vancouver’s Railtown neighbourhood. “They don’t know what to do with you. I feel like that’s where I fit in.”

When it comes to art, he’s not interested in shock value, he says. Although he does believe it’s “important to leave somebody a little bit unsettled; leave them wondering what they just looked at.”

Preston’s ease with exploring edge-case questions — often raised by his own, self-professed outsider status — is evident in his first solo exhibition, Digitizing Indigeneity, currently showing at Never Apart, in Montreal, through June 27. The sprawling virtual exhibition showcases his fluency across media, including sculpture, printmaking, photography, soundscape and digital media.

As with the rest of his practice, Preston’s instinct toward iconoclasm is front and centre throughout Digitizing Indigeneity. Describing himself as an “urban, queer Indigenous artist,” Preston is a Cree man, raised on the West Coast among Coast Salish elders and artists, who paints Formline poodles — a “clan symbol” for “those of us out there who are disenfranchised.” He explores feelings of displacement from the community of his birth and from his family’s ancestral lands in Alberta in a series of exquisite black-and-white photographs recording the decay of fence posts and abandoned automobiles under epic prairie skies.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/preston-buffalo-is-taking-the-power-back

Zoë Laycock is telling me her story. In describing the present, she slips into language that suggests she’s just now looked up to discover her good fortune.

“I guess it all wove together in this magnificent web,” she’ll say. Or, “It’s just kind of whirlwinded into something really good.”

This modesty is perhaps unsurprising, given the path Zoë has been walking. From a young age, her life and work have been characterized by an ethic of service. Service to her community, especially, has been a guiding light for the artist, tutor, community worker and researcher.

The truth appears to be that Zoë herself is the author of her own luck. It’s her fortitude, her quiet assuredness, and her willingness to step into unfamiliar spaces that have found her at the centre of that whirlwind.

Born and raised in Calgary, Zoë is Anishnaabe Métis on her mother’s side, with a father of European descent. Since before she was born, Zoë’s parents have run Métis Calgary Family Services (MCFS) — a non-profit outreach centre for urban Aboriginal parents and children. Zoë’s relationship with that organization has been lifelong.

“Not only did I work there actively for nine years, I literally grew up there, as a part of all the goings on,” she says. “So, that aspect of engagement with my Indigenous community — especially in an urban setting — is something that has always been a natural part of my life and my practice, I guess.”

Zoë was taught Métis beadwork as a child, and has always been an avid writer. “I’m a songwriter and I write poetry and I’ve always journaled and written passionately about secret small things,” she says. She also maintains a material art practice. Currently, for example, that practice involves beading Anishnaabe words into oil paintings — a literal intervention of Indigenous language and material practice into the “colonial fabric of a historically Eurocentric, white-dominated medium.” She has also beaded objects including her grandmother’s bingo dabber, which Zoë says speaks to the “cultural importance of gambling and bingo as activities to gather around” within contemporary Indigenous communities.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/zoë-laycock-finds-balance-in-art-outreach-and-community-practice

Sydney Pickering, artist, researcher, activist, family archivist and community advocate, whose work both defines and defies each of these titles, sits in the Aboriginal Gathering Place (AGP) midmorning on a rainy Tuesday.

The AGP is quiet, though working steadily in each of its three offices, just behind Sydney’s chair, are the women who run Aboriginal Programs and provide access to culturally specific learning for Indigenous students at Emily Carr University: Brenda Crabtree, Director of Aboriginal Programs and Special Advisor to the President on Indigenous Initiatives; Connie Watts, Associate Director of Aboriginal Programs; and Angela Marston, who recently joined the team as Aboriginal Program Coordinator.

Technically a transplant from the prairies, Sydney is Vancouver Island-born, and a once-distant daughter of the Coast Mountains, now returned. Currently in the final stages of her undergraduate degree at Emily Carr, she was recently hired on as a paid researcher for the AGP. And while her work in that role has kept her plenty busy, she’s been keenly observing everyone around her.

“It’s been really humbling to see how they work and make changes happen — changes that I didn’t think were happening before,” she says of Brenda, Connie and Angela. “It’s been really eye-opening to learn from them, to just sit here, listening, watching.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/sydney-pickering-tanning-hides-rekindling-connections-learning-changemakers-agp