Maps and Dreams
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings, SFU Woodward's in the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Vancouver Jack Askoty, Brittney and Richelle Bear Hat, Jennifer Bowes, Brenda Draney, Emilie Mattson, Karl Mattson, Garry Oker, Peter von Tiesenhausen
Curated by Brian Jungen and Melanie O’Brian, Maps and Dreams explores conceptions and implications of land use through cultural and industrial lenses. The exhibition specifically considers the territory of the Dane-zaa people of northeastern British Columbia, now in Treaty 8. Borrowing the title from Hugh Brody’s 1981 anthropological study of the Dane-zaa, Maps and Dreams includes work by artists from the region who consider how this land and its human use is interpreted, represented and often contested.
For this exhibition, Maps and Dreams and Treaty 8 offer a set of cultural, historical, environmental and political markers in which the participating artists’ works are located. The works connect the personal to the regional context. The artists present Indigenous and settler perspectives, take up forms of literal and figurative mapping, and through diverse strategies and speculative inquiries, engage with a complex entanglement between multi-faceted dreams and the land.
Image: Jennifer M. Bowes, In Silence, 2017. Photographic documentation of a performance. Courtesy the artist.