The third required reading in the course that began last week is an issue of C Magazine (number 136) guested edited by BUSH Gallery. According to the BUSH Gallery website,
BUSH Gallery is a space for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art mediums might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. This model of decolonial, non-institutional ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous creative production is at the heart of BUSH Gallery. (BUSH)
It’s not entirely clear to me whether BUSH Gallery is a virtual project or if it has a physical location, or if it’s both. There’s not a lot of information on the gallery’s web site, other than its mission statement. However, elsewhere on the internet, I learn this:
Activated by Tania Willard, Peter Morin, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Jeneen Frei Njootli and many others, BUSH Gallery is an Indigenous-led, land-based, experimental and conceptual gallery that creates a radically inclusive space of art and action. (Toronto Biennial of Art)
Another description of a BUSH Gallery project in Winnipeg that I found online says this:
we strive to connect what we are doing as Indigenous artists with valuing and circulating within local Indigenous economies and communities, while also creating space for conceptual, experimental and performative land-based Indigenous led contemporary art. By practicing reciprocity and value-based systems of Indigenous knowledges, centred by our specific cultural backgrounds, we make galleries of thought, colour, land, sky, text and interrelationality. (Plug In ICA)
The artists who seem to be the prime movers behind BUSH Gallery are Indigenous: Peter Morin is from Tahltan First Nation; Tania Willard from Secwepemc First Nation; Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is Cree and Métis; and Jeneen Frei Njootli describes herself as “2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech and Dutch” (University of British Columbia, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory). All of this tells me that BUSH Gallery is engaged in a variety of land-based, Indigenous-led, contemporary art practices—both object-oriented and relational or social—based in Indigenous values. And, if I’d only read the issue beforehand, I could’ve avoided all of that research, because much of it is revealed through the articles it includes.
However, only Willard and Morin acted as guest editors for this issue of C Magazine, according to its masthead. The issue begins with “The BUSH Manifesto”:
BUSH gallery is a space for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art mediums might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. This model of decolonial, non-institutional ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous creative production is at the heart of BUSH gallery. (6)
The gallery is described as “a trans-conceptual gallery space,” meaning that its purpose is “to reposition ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions” (6). “A trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux—never settling, like the flow of water in a river,” the manifesto continues. “One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices which are born out of a lived connection to the land” (6).
The gallery is “out on the land” and away from “the colonized space of art institutions”; it brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous media, such as beading with installation art, or performance art and storytelling (6).
A series of one-sentence paragraphs, or perhaps a poetic text structured through anaphora, follows, describing the characteristics of BUSH gallery:
BUSH gallery is alive and breathing.
BUSH gallery is on Indigenous lands.
BUSH gallery is animate and inanimate at the same time.
BUSH gallery is radically inclusive—all bodies and
lands and kids and dogs and bears are welcome. (6)
BUSH gallery includes walking, Indigenous languages, and conversations; it “is in constant transition as the land is in constant transition,” it “knows that disruption inspires growth,” it “is a place of hope and no hope” (6). It is “for Indigenous and non-Indigenous art and artists and curators and thinkings and grandmothers and grandfathers and fathers and mothers and cousins and aunties and uncles” (7). “Bush gallery is sometimes a blockade, sometimes a bridge, always a balancing beam,” the manifesto continues (7), again speaking to the connection (I think) the gallery makes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. The range of work that interests BUSH gallery is broad: “BUSH gallery is performance, installation, craft, conceptual, painting, photography, stand up comedy, cooking, movie watching with trees and many other things you might call bullshit on ’cause they are not really art. But bullshit is part of BUSH gallery too” (7). BUSH gallery is interested in Indigenous languages more than popular culture or social media (7). It “works towards Indigenous resurgence,” is “expanded, not limited, by tradition,” is feminist, “inauthentic,” “unsettled,” but most of all about the land: “BUSH gallery is on the land, researches land, goes to the land, because the land is the foundation of Indigenous life and Indigenous struggle. . . . BUSH gallery thanks the land” (7).
In their introduction to the issue, Morin and Willard are clearer about the gallery’s location: “BUSH gallery is located on the traditional territories of the Secwepemc Nation, hosted on Tania Willard’s land,” they write, although it is also “a series of on-going gatherings of like-minded folks united under questions concerning art making, land, Indigenous art history and interventions into the colonial. These gatherings focus on experimental investigations that enable the complexities of Indigenous knowing along with an active disengagement with western logic” (8). In this issue, Morin and Willard continue, they “dared to ask this question about land: does it help us to realize the depth of Indigenous art history when we make art on the reserve outside of gallery and museum systems?” (8). They see this issue as “a decolonization of the idea of an art magazine or an art review or art writing or art criticism” (8). They asked contributors to “consider the future and space-making”; to think about “the creative force of the body”; “to give voice to aesthetic experiences in their communities,” defined as on- and off-reserve and Indigenous and non-Indigenous spaces “in which they find home and cultural continuity and safety”; to decentre the city “as the place of contemporary art” and to think about “what it means for contemporary art conversations to circulate in rural or non-art spaces” (8).
In the introduction’s last paragraph, Morin and Willard note that no contemporary art galleries or artist-run centres exist on First Nations reserves “because people have been too busy surviving” (8). They state, “we want to ask the spirits: is it a good idea to have Indigenous art galleries on a reserve or on the land? What do Indigenous artist-run centres look like on Indian land? And when they do happen on reserve land, do they just feel like artist-run centres in cities?” (8). I wonder why the Woodland Cultural Centre—not on the Six Nations reserve, admittedly, but on land owned by the Six Nations of the Grand River—is excluded here. Is it not contemporary enough?
The first article is “To Be At The Mercy Of The Sky” by poet Billy-Ray Belcourt. He’s also a photographer, I discover as I turn the page, because the article—a prose poem, I think, or a work of creative nonfiction—is illustrated with his photography. The text reflects on what’s left of the Indian Residential School in Joussard, Alberta: “what remains exceeds the infrastructural remains, we are caught up in the afterlife of captivity, cages were made out of bodies, and then bodies out of anything that was left behind” (13). He calls that physical location “this primal scene, this open wound,” a painful place to visit (13). He notes that wealthy settler cottagers spent their summers “just a few feet away from this prison house,” thinking nothing of it, bathing “in the aroma of violence” but with their senses of self remaining intact, unlike his own self, which has been “dragged through the dirt of bad social structures” and “cannot bear this kind of looking” (13). He imagines the provincial government making the ruins into a historic site, crawling “out of the bloody maw of the past, smiling with the carcasses of words like history and forgiveness hanging from their lips,” mistaking “the red on their skin for sunlight” (13). Those words remind me of our premier’s remarks after the 215 children were discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School—a man who has fought every First Nations initiative as hard as he could but who sheds crocodile tears over the dead.
Belcourt is “fixed by the darkness that emanates from the doorway,” all that’s left of the school and the subject of the accompanying photograph. He writes, “it is a thick nothingness at which i feel compelled to stare. nothingness is a thing. a lot of indians live there. i don’t blame them; who needs a map when the world is labyrinthine? who needs geography when there are doorways everywhere?” (13). He writes of the dead, their desire for revenge—and that reminds me of the bodies of children in Kamloops. This entire text reminds me of them. “there is no shelter under skies like these,” Belcourt concludes. “when i was a little boy, my mooshum told me a story about the day the sky fell down. the sky is still falling, but only indians can tell the difference. i look up, and down comes an endless parade of half-smiling children” (13).
“Refracting Bush,” by Ashok Mathur, is the second article. Mathur is a South Asian writer and visual artist and the Dean of Graduate Studies at OCAD University. He beings by telling us his text is neither an essay nor a review nor an interrogation; instead, “this is a speculation and a way of reflecting through” (16)—reflecting through, I think, the opposition between “Cube,” on the one hand—the art gallery—and “Bush” (16), but also considering “openings and opportunities that happen through what Bush might be. What Bush reaches for and pulls a muscle in doing so” (16). In fact, he begins by asking whether there actually is an “oppositional binary” between Cube and Bush (16). “We cannot speak of Bush without having in mind Cube. . . . And we cannot think of Cube without rendering its negative space as Bush,” Mathur writes (16). Actually, I think Bush is probably ignored and unthought, left out of the art world’s consideration—but that’s just my sense of things.
Mathur notes that he once had a show where he “tried to think through the project of the written novel and reimagine it as space” (16). The accompanying photographs document that work, which was exhibited at BUSH gallery—or at least reinstalled there after its initial showing. He describes it “as a palimpsest of targeted love, those self-same scrims hanging between trees and across shrubs, readable in the moonlight and rain showers and giving evidence of the novel to the land and the bugs and the animals who came across the installations” (16). He recalls a journey north to Tahtlan territory, from grassland to mountains, not climbing but rather staying near the car to look at “the clouds shadow the prints Peter [Morin] had installed on the banks” (16). He recalls projecting work onto trees (17).
Then he turns from Bush to Cube: “Bringing dirt into the gallery is a sign of Cube critique and re-invention of the gallery, but is it Bush and what might Bush be if you brought in hardwood floors and drywall, which is what the gallery in the urban centre is if you time-travel back a few hundred years. The question is not how to differentiate, but what constitutees the difference, perspectivally and perceptually” (17).
Mathur asks if “being on Indigenous land” is “what makes Bush, Bush?” (17). What is Indigenous land, though? It goes far beyond the boundaries of reserves, doesn’t it? Is it true that “land imitates art wherever it goes” (17)? “The exterior of the Cube space, whether urban or far-flung rural has elements of Bush, even if the ground is concrete instead of humus,” he continues (17). Is that true? What then is Bush? Or is this a recognition that Indigenous land includes the places where the Cube is located?
Mathur wonders what form the earth’s art review would take: it would decentre language and move “from affect to affection” (17). Is that a way of thinking about our relationship to the land? If the land would decentre language, though, why the wordplay?
Next, Mather considers addressing injustice from a position on the land versus doing so in the city. Protests take place in the streets, but “streets are not animal paths, and what of the idea of corrective measures taken by the streams and watering holes, demands of systemic change under a clear blue sky?” (17). Here Mathur is ascribing intention and agency to the land, seeing it as a living thing.
He wonders if bringing BUSH gallery into a city “is an experiment in redecolonization or derecolonization” (17). Or can we get beyond that history of colonization? “If we cease a focus on those histories, might that reinvent a future, or does that doom us to historical repetition? Or maybe Bush, by its very iteration, already encapsulates such critiques, and yet, through oblique reference, allows a shift into new terrain,” he writes (17).
In his conclusion, he notes that none of his remarks are solutions or directions, “but merely a struggle to complexify and re-identify where Bush might lead us, or how we might lead ourselves into a new form of roughing it in the Bush” (17). The risk is that we might overdetermine this identity and “promote a demise as we prescribe a genesis” (17). “The path of Bush, it seems, is best understood not with a spotlight but under a whispering rain,” he states, a suggestion of its subtlety, and the need for us to be subtle in attempting to apprehend it as well.
The next article is “Coney Island Baby,” by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Amy Kazymerchyk, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Jeneen Frei Njootli. It is a conversation about a film, Coney Island Baby, that documents trapping rabbits on Gwich’in territory, and “the ideas at the heart” of that film (19). The film’s title refers to the place in New York, which was named after the many rabbits that lived there (19). “Coney” is also the root of “cunny,” from which “cunt” is derives, and so the film links trapping rabbits—“a feminized and often diminished kind of labour—to the idea of bunnies as feminized and sexualized, like ski bunnies and Playboy bunnies,” L’Hirondelle Hill states (19). She “wanted to talk about Indigenous women’s and feminized labour without essentializing or falling back on a gender binary,” she continues. “Maybe the way to put it is that when labour is feminized and racialized, it is also often devalued, no matter who does it” (19).
L’Hirondelle Hill’s uncle had a trapline in Ottawa, inside the city limits, and he taught her how to trap rabbits (19). She thought it would be interesting to set up a trapline in Vancouver, but then decided that wouldn’t be respectful, so instead the project moved to Secwepemculew, “the territory of the Secwepemc nation,” where Willard gave the team permission to trap and became part of the project (19). Njootli adds, “BUSH gallery just seemed like a natural place to return to and continue that conversation. In terms of being respectful or mindful in one’s practice, it feels right to be invited to stay in a good friend’s home and to work around their kids and family, while also being able to contribute to the labour of taking care of a family and a home” (19). Those aspects of the project were as important as snaring the rabbits, she continues: “I really like that we made an effort to film all of the work that was happening around the snaring, which are also forms of feminized labour in domestic space” (19). Kazymerchyk agrees: “BUSH is still flexible about experimenting and improvising new ways of making art and taking care of each other” (19).
Melting Tallow notes that the project allowed her to feel, in an embodied way, that she was contributing despite her disability (20). Kazymerchyk comments, “autonomous collectives like BUSH gallery have an opportunity to initiate fairer and more flexible economic and professional protocols that acknowledge those different levels of labour,” unlike other contemporary art institutions, which “have very narrow parameters around the forms of work, methods of productivity and outcomes and deliverables that are supported and commended,” parameters that disadvantage disabled people who can’t meet them (20). Justice and fairness involve “creating protocols that are flexible, and working processes that are negotiable, to be able to meet people’s individual conditions” (20).
Rabbits are abundant and feed people,” Njootli notes, but also “they have a kind of quiet medicine. Their coats are protective and camouflage them, so unless you really pay attention, or are really present and know them, you won’t likely get to see them” (21). She suggests that is an analogy to the film and around a finished work of art: “I think it’s really fitting that we didn’t catch any rabbits during the shoot. Part of me is really glad. Not catching any is perfect because it’s made us talk more about our time together and labour and the land—more than how to respectfully depict the snaring” (21). It also led her to reflect on the meaning of success, about what it means to have a relationship with rabbits (21). L’Hirondelle Hill notes that Indigenous communities help each other be fed and healthy “through this crazy network”—another kind of unacknowledged labour (21).
The conversation shifts to Socrates and the notion of peripatetic philosophy. L’Hirondelle Hill suggests that the 60 million refugees walking are philosophers who are not being listened to (21). That reminded the group of the way that the labour of some people—particularly disabled people—is invisible (23). Njootli agrees: “there are so many ways of participating and being deeply engaged and very present that don’t always look like ‘contributing.’ It often comes down to a question of legibility. Silence in some scenarios is read as non-participation. But sometimes there’s a kind of participation going on that has a longer duration, more depth and more strength than what’s immediately legible” (23). Coney Island Baby was in part about “ideas of legibility, like the legibility of Indigenous women, our labour and our forms of relationships,” she concludes. “But also our legibility to each other, right? And so, part of our learning has also been about how to present that in the film” (23).
Amish Morrell’s “A Feat for the Stewards of the Land: Contemporary Art and Netyukulimk on Unama’ki” is a reflection on the Feast of Stewards project, the culminating performance of Ursula Johnson’s (re)al-location, a work that waspart of LandMarks2017. “(re)al-location was a process that began during a Banff residency when Johnson created a foliage patterned textile representing the present-day ecologies” of the Cape Breton Highlands,” and it “was adapted into a series of costume accessories—costumes, masks, bandannas and jumpsuits—transforming the students and others who wore them into superhero-like stewards of the Highlands” (27). Festival of Stewards was held in a campground over the course of an afternoon in a very rural area. “This provides a challenging context for the presentation and reception of contemporary art, where there are no art organizations and any potential audience is unlikely to be familiar with its language and conventions,” Morrell writes. “It does, however, offer a rich and complex site for thinking about what a critical practice might look like in relation to the systems and practices of survival that shape the reality and imagination of those who live in such places” (27).
“In (re)al-location Johnson set out to explore the Mi’kmaq philosophy of Netukulimk, a concept that has also informed her past work in sculpture and performance,” Morrell continues. “Explained in the most basic terms, Netukulimk describes the practice of maintaining sustainable relationships to the land, taking only as much as one needs for one’s family and community. But it also encapsulates a worldview, with both sacred and practical forms of knowledge that are embedded in the land, including rules and obligations that ensure the continued regeneration of life” (27). Making a basket isn’t just making a basket: it’s an entire knowledge of the land, and the resulting basket “is an animate object, a body of lived knowledge, inseparable from the ecological and cultural context within which it is made and used” (27). Practicing Netukulimk “doesn’t merely include sustainable hunting, but re-learning its spiritual and practical significance” (27).
Festival of Stewards had a fire, performances by local musicians, food (beans and fishcakes), traditional Mi’kmaq games, and conversation (27-28). It also included collaborations with other artists from Cape Breton, who explored their connection to the land (28). Johnson’s role in the event “was that of host and organizer, introducing the performers, stoking the fire, cajoling and managing the team of volunteers and students” (28). At the end of the day, Johnson and the volunteers brought out 1,000 pieces of moose meat and grilled them on the fire (28). “It was a transgressive gesture that stood the risk of re-igniting volatile exchanges between Mi’kmaq hunters, settler communities and provincial and federal institutions such as the Department of Natural Resources and Parks Canada,” Morrell writes, alluding to the history of conflict between the Mi’kmaq hunters and those other communities and institutions, particularly in relation to hunting in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, where the moose was killed. “These are among the continued obstacles that come into play around the practice of Netukulimk” (28).
“Both Festival of Stewards and (re)al-location explored these ideas”—of the relationship of those communities to Netukulimk—“through a complex—and at times, transgressive—social choreography,” Morrell continues. “Though it was not explicit in the publicity for Festival of Stewards, Johnson’s project engaged two difficult and contentious events centred around the Cape Breton Highlands National Park: the moose culls held in 2015 and 2016, and the expropriation of lands for the creation of the park in 1936” (28-29):
While addressing federal and provincial institutional structures that determine wildlife management and how we imagine and interact with wild spaces, (re)al-location served to recuperate the invisible structures that shape our relationship to the land: stories, practices of survival, the land and its memories. These stories and practices are not separate from contemporary life, but map a different “contemporary”—one that extends across time and memory, grounded in histories, places and forms of knowledge that survive at the peripheries of a global, neo-liberal world order. (29)
In this way, Morrell writes, “(re)al-location thus intervened within the very definitions of contemporary art, working with a vocabulary that is specific to Unama’ki and the northern Highlands, that arises from histories of survival and Mi’kmaq philosophy” (29).
The next article, Jeremy Dutcher’s “to the archive,” is a visual score in Dutcher’s language, Wolastoqiyik and English. I don’t know how to perform it, though, so I skipped ahead to “Re-centring Knowledge,” an interview with artist and curator Anique Jordan by Willard. Her work, The Public—Land and Body (West), was a video art exhibition presented at Black Creek Community Farm in Toronto. It included work by artists Yu Gu, Lisa Hirmer, Lisa Myers, Ella Cooper, and Joshua Vettivelu, and panel discussions with Cooper, Erica Violet Lee, Sabrina “Butterfly” GoPaul, and Jordan. Willard discusses that project with Jordan, who notes that Indigenous people, Black people, and other racialized groups feel uncomfortable at places like the Art Gallery of Ontario. “I feel like it’s up to artists and curators, and whomever is in the gallery world, to always be thinking about how the work that we are doing is a reflection of the experiences in the communities that we have come from,” Jordan states. “And therefore how do we give that back to them, to those spaces. I wanted to be able to do something that was not centred in the downtown core but reached out into the wings of the city, which are the places I grew up in and did all my community work in” (35). Willard agrees: the art gallery is intimidating to “people who feel like the gallery has some kind of colonial authority about it,” and says that she is “very much interested in decentring that and valuing other spaces of artistic exploration” (35). Jordan cites an idea from artist and educator Quill Christie: relationships are a core artistic practice (37). She used her aunt and her mother as a barometer: “if they can go to a space and feel a visceral response or feel like they are comfortable talking about it or finding their own meaning through it, then I feel like it’s a success” (37). I’m not sure any of my aunts and uncles would find any comfort in seeing contemporary art, and I wonder to what degree that metric would result in a different kind of work than that which Jordan values. However, she argues that having a panel discussion and involving the community in the presentation of the work was important (37).
The gallery educators, who came from an Indigenous youth residency led by Quill, went through an orientation “where we focused on what they thought of the art—what questions, feelings, stories they felt came from it—it was then their interpretation of the work that led visitors through,” Jordan recalls:
Making sure to continue to reiterate you are a keeper of knowledge. You can make sense of this. You know things. You bring so much. Together we asked what, for you, is coming from this? What is it that makes sense to you? What would you ask of this? It was really just asking questions of each other so that they had the space to come up with their own language to speak about the artworks. That was one of the most important components to the project, one that no one would have seen. When visitors came to the site, they would be led around by one of these young people. They would be speaking, and it wouldn’t be something I told them as a script. They would be speaking from their own perspectives, from the ways they understand this artwork. This is the way I want to work. I am constantly re-centering where knowledge comes from and affirming that. (37)
That’s an interesting process. I’m often baffled by contemporary art without context provided by a curator or by the artist. I accept that bafflement: that I can’t make sense of the work, that I don’t know things, that whatever I bring to it is insufficient. Sometimes I think bafflement is the intention. Maybe I’m wrong, or thick-headed.
“One of the great things about the installation,” Jordan continues, “was how children related to the work” (37). She contrasts that installation to large cultural institutions, where children are taught to obey rules, to be silent and not to play (37). “And I thought about how when we did this program at the farm, they were taught how to be free,” she states. “How to run. How to touch things. How to eat things that they found” (37-38). She “started seeing how confining an arts institution can be. Why wouldn’t we want it to be a place of freedom? It’s not a space where you can breathe and see a horizon behind the work or feel as though you can remember there is land and communities and neighbourhoods and people surrounding it” (38).
The artwork was in relationship with the site, the farm itself: the art and the farm informed each other (38). “I also thought about it as refusal, as a practice of refusal, where we are going to do this because we are artists and we are people in a community and this is our community space and we don’t need permission to show the work that comes from us,” Jordan continues. “Even within that I also recognized that we were able to do that because there was money backing it. Which is important because artists have to be paid and their labour has to be accounted for” (38). The freedom the exhibition created, she concludes, “was a human way to experience art” (38).
The next article, “Primary Colours: Preparing a New Generation,” by Clayton Windatt, discusses a four-day gathering in Victoria, B.C., where “Indigenous artists, black artists, artists of colour and artists of settler heritage” came together “to discuss shared histories of colonialism, race and convention in the arts” (41). “This gathering acted as a platform of investigation into exclusionary power dynamics, exploring the constructs of inclusivity, building collective memory and offering tools to those attending, who represented all generations of cultural leaders from diverse and marginalized communities locally, nationally and internationally,” Windatt continues. “Explorations of privilege, abuse, control and ways to circumvent those hazards within institutionalized models served as tools handed from one generation of cultural leaders to the next” (41).
Windatt notes that the gathering, and the accompanying exhibition Deconstructing Comfort, considered “the constructs of ‘decolonization’ and ‘indigenization’ within Canada” (41). He suggests that for a non-Indigenous person, “the act of following Indigenous modes of being can be an act of decolonization but it is not an act of indigenization, as you can never change your blood or heritage” (42).
“Our relationships are messy and our identities are complicated but Primary Colours focuses our energies into collective actions,” Windatt concludes:
Bringing us all together allows us to find ways to empower one another through acts of collaboration and honest effort towards mutually beneficial goals for all. This also extends to those who may not consider themselves to be part of a marginalized group. Everyone needs to understand that these conversations discuss all people, and that major decisions about the climate of the arts and potential futures for Canada are taking place. (42)
The conversations, he continues, were about “the transfer of power from the existing infrastructures to new leaders” (42). I’m not sure what to think about this event or Windatt’s account of it. I will say, though, that my small experience in the art world has often involved being discounted, shamed, and rejected—despite my white skin, which might make me look like part of the “existing infrastructures” that must lose power.
The next article, “Learning from the Land: BUSH gallery @dechintau,” is a photo essay, impossible to summarize here. The final article in the issue is Karyn Recollet’s “Kinstillatory Gathering.” I’ve read articles where she uses that term, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it means (and I’ve tried), so I’m very interested in what she has to say, but her poetic prose refuses to give me the definition I’m seeking, except to say that Indigenous languages “are kinstillatory” (51). The word seems to be a portmanteau combining “kin” and “constellation” but I’d already figured that much out. Then come reviews of exhibitions, which are a curious combination of what I would typically understand to be reviews and poetic artist statements, book reviews, and shorter articles.
There. I’ve done another assigned reading for the course I’m taking. My eyes hurt—the print on my iPad is tiny—and I’m tired. I still have to go for a walk somewhere, part of my assigned coursework, although I might need to take a break first. Don’t kid yourself: these three-week intensive courses are killers.
Works Cited
BUSH Gallery. Conceptual and Experimental Indigenous led land-based artist rez-idency. https://www.bushgallery.ca.
C Magazine, no. 136, 2018. https://cmagazine.com/issues/136/pdf.
Plug In ICA. Summer Institute Session II: Site/ation with BUSH gallery. August 2018. https://plugin.org/exhibitions/bush-gallery/.
Toronto Biennial of Art. Bush Gallery. https://torontobiennial.org/artist-contributor/bush-gallery/.
University of British Columbia, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory. Jeneen Frei Njootli. https://ahva.ubc.ca/persons/jeneen-frei-njootli/.
