asinnajaq, Katherine Boyer, Erin Marie Konsmo, Dawn Marie Marchand
Finding Our Way
Exhibition Run: January 27- April 6, 2024
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre 10124 96 St Edmonton, AB
Wayfinding is commonly known as a physical way for people to orient themselves in physical space and assist in navigating in a place they are not familiar with. Wayfinding for Indigenous peoples within an art context often involves broader resources and understandings related to land based/cultural navigation. This can be through navigational tools such as the sun and moon, river cart trails or snow drifts, the medicine wheel/four directions or a cree syllabics chart. This method of wayfinding often leads us to connections to culture in impactful ways that can be observed or actioned through listening, sight, smell, touch, or taste.
In Finding Our Way, the exhibiting artists explore the ways in which we find a way back to a home that we once knew seek to know) or to bring an awareness to what we determine is to be found in a cultural navigational mode. Each artist uses their own mediums to explore their relationships to family, home, land and community and the different ways in which we find or locate ourselves within them.
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Exhibition run: January 27 - April 6, 2024
Gallery Hours: 12pm-5pm, Wednesday to Saturday
Closing Reception: April 6, 2024
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
asinnajaq is from Inukjuak, Nunavik and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Her work includes photography, filmmaking, writing and curating. She co-created Tillitarniit a three day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. Asinnajaq wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary. They co-curated Isuma’s show in the ‘Canadian’ pavilion at the 58th Venice. In 2020 asinnajaq was long listed for the Sobey Art Award. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq. Asinnajaq programmed the Flaherty NYC 2022 fall program Let’s all be lichen. In their work, asinnajaq is interested in sharing tools for navigating life’s journey.
Katherine Boyer (Métis/white Settler) is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work is focused on methods bound to textile arts and the handmade - primarily woodworking and beadwork. Boyer’s art and research encompasses personal family narratives, entwined with Métis history, material culture, architectural spaces (human made and natural). Her work often explores boundaries between two opposing things as an effort to better understand both sides of a perceived dichotomous identity. This manifests in long, slow, and laborious processes that attempt to unravel and better understand history, environmental influences, and personal memories.
In the past year she has exhibited in significant exhibitions such as: Storied Objects (Remai Modern); Radical Stitch (Mackenzie Art Gallery); Kwaata-nihtaawakihk – A Hard Birth (Winnipeg Art Gallery); along with her solo exhibition How the Sky Carries the Sun, which has toured to multiple locations such as the Art Gallery of Regina, Platform Centre and is scheduled to exhibit into 2024/2025. Most recently Boyer was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award and a recipient of the Falconer Emerging Researcher Award. She currently holds a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, School of Art.
Erin Konsmo (she/they) is an Alberta-raised Prairie queer of Métis (MMF citizen) and settler Canadian descent, visual artist, harvester & fisher, and community organizer based out of Winnipeg, MB. Their arts practice currently focuses on fish scale art; an art form they were mentored into by Métis artist Jaime Morse. This practice includes the use of lake whitefish scales to create florals as well as using macro photography and digital art to magnify the gifts from the fish by taking small-in-scale gifts and digitally scaling them up in size. She is also a textile artist, taking inspiration from her mothers sewing room and loves a good perusal through drawers full of fabric, rick rack, trims and lace. In the winter months, they enjoy spending time ice fishing, processing the gifts from the fish and sharing the glamour and iridescence of fish scales. In spring and summer, Erin enjoys listening to frog songs, picking medicines, and canoeing to visit beavers.
In addition to her artistic practice, Erin is a community practitioner who works in the areas of somatics/embodiment, sustainable organizing, healing justice and sexual and reproductive health.
Dawn Marie Marchand is a member of Cold Lake First Nation in Treaty Six territory.
cîpêhcakwawêw-iskwêw (Blue Horse Spirit Woman) is a Cree and Metis artist, educator, advocate, author, writer, speaker, and mother. Her artwork seeks to find ways to remind Canadians of their original history through Treaty. Her many noted accomplishments include: art installations for the Edmonton Folk Festival in 2013, Edmonton City Hall in 2014 during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stop in Edmonton, “Edmonton Treaty 6 Soccer ball” in 2016, Nuit Blanche in 2018. She has organized and facilitated numerous Indigenous pop-up exhibits including; the Walrus Talks-Aboriginal City art components in 2015, the first National Gathering of Elders in 2018, the facilitation of the Indigenous Artist Market Collective engagement and launch in 2018. She received an Aboriginal Role Model Award for Art in 2017, during her term as the inaugural Indigenous Artist In Residence for the City of Edmonton. In mid 2019, she relocated to Smoky Lake, AB where she opened Blue Horse Gallery and Studio. She has since added International attention with work projected in Expo Dubai in 2021 and installed permanent public art in the Stanley Milnar Library. In 2022, she started working with Metis Nation of Alberta to create spaces that support Metis Artists in Edmonton. She continued work with Punctuate Theatre as Designer in Residence where she supported the artistic authenticity in First Metis Man of Odesa, had her work projected during the 2023 Junos and installed artwork in Banff National Park as part of their “Art in Nature” exhibit.