PAXSI, JAIME BLACK, HANNAH CLAUS, LINDSAY DOBBIN
Body and Water
February 5, 2022 to April 9, 2022
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre 10124 96 St Edmonton, AB
Body and Water explores the experience of moving through waterways, moving between land and water and the interconnected relationships we share with bodies of water. Each artist reflects on their own experience on the way we connect through kinship, teachings, histories, and evolutions. Calling on the calming subtle shift of the lapping of waves over the body to draw in our own personal narratives of the body in water.
The original iteration was presented in 2021 after a year long curatorial research project at Oxygen art centre in Nelson, B.C.
oxygenartcentre.org
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Exhibition run: February 5, 2022 to April 9, 2022
Gallery Hours: 12pm-5pm, Wednesday to Saturday
Accessibility notes: Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre is barrier-free and is equipped with a lift to reach upper floors and lower floor gallery. Single stall and wide stall washrooms available on every floor. Children are welcome! Change tables available in select washrooms.
ETS stops at 96 Street and Jasper (routes 2, 5, 88, 120, 308, 309), 97 Street and Jasper Avenue (3, 14, 100, 109, 161, 162). Paid city street parking and paid Impark lots available.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jaime Black is a multidisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and Finnish descent who lives and works in Winnipeg. Black’s practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Through her art practice, Black creates space and time to connect with and enter into a relationship with the land in which she works, creating images and impressions from a space of connection.
Hannah Claus is a Kanienkehá:ka and English visual artist who explores Onkwehonwe epistemologies as living transversal relationships throughout her artistic practice. A 2019 Eiteljorg fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, her installations have been included in exhibitions across Canada, including Àbadakone: Continuous Fire at the National Gallery of Canada in 2018; Des horizons d’attentes at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and How Long Does It Take for One Voice to Reach Another at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, both in 2021. Claus lives and works in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, Tiohtià:ke | Montréal, where she teaches at Concordia University, is a board member of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and a founding member of daphne, Tiohtià:ke's new Indigenous artist-run centre.
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka - Acadian - Irish water protector, artist, musician, storyteller, curator and educator who lives and works in Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Dobbin's relational and place-responsive practice is a living process—following curiosity rather than form, the way of water, with the intent of understanding and kinship. As a human being with intersecting identities as well as personal and ancestral displacement and trauma, their practice honours direct experience as a way of coming to (un)know while listening for the shared beingness, health and resilience in meeting waters. Their transdisciplinary work in sound art, music, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity, and explores the connection between the environment and the body, engaging in a sensorial intimacy with the land and water. Dobbin aims to bring attention to the natural world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
Paxsi (they/jupa) is an Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist and musician based in amiskwaciwâskahikan. With beadwork, illustration, and songwriting as their primary practices, Paxsi’s work centres Indigequeer celebration and resistance. Paxsi is the 2021 recipient of the JRG Society for the Arts’ Emerging Artist Award, which provides grants to disabled artists and filmmakers from coast-to-coast. They currently have a publication in Hungry Zine, and with Making Space at Latitude 53. Paxsi is currently working on a visual arts project with funding from the Student Undergraduate Research Fund, awarded by the Faculty of Fine Arts at MacEwan University. You can find their work and more on their Instagram, @paxsi__.
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ARTIST RESPONSE - PAXSI: March 10, 2022 - View the response on our YouTube page
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ARTIST RESPONSE - JAIME BLACK: March 17, 2022 - View the Response on our YouTube Page
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ARTIST RESPONSE - HANNAH CLAUS: March 24, 2022 - View the Response on our YouTube Page
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ARTIST RESPONSE - LINDSAY DOBBIN: March 31, 2022 - View the Response on our YouTube Page