Exhibition: Olivia Whetung - Sugarbush Shrapnel

Tickets

Cost: Free

Alvin Balkind Gallery

Whetung’s artistic practice examines, in her words, “acts of/active native presence.” A significant strand of recent research has manifested in beadwork, and explores Whetung’s deep concerns for knowledge as held and carried by land, bodies of water and language. Beading is itself an embodied act and in Whetung’s work, the sounds of words, knowledge of waterways and care of the land are carried by the beads without entirely revealing them, and what we face is a new translation—testament to the ways in which Whetung employs Anishinaabe visuality to both withhold and re-inscribe meaning.

For her solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Whetung proposes to continue such investigations to consider questions of sustainable food sources, invasive species and flooding in her own home territory, especially in light of accelerating global climate change. Sobering climate predictions in her own region suggest imagined futures of what foods will or won’t exist there in decades to come—specifically the Anishinaabe practice of maple syruping—and how this will impact Indigenous peoples’ abilities to pass cultural knowledge and stewardship of the environment through food to subsequent generations. These concerns will manifest as new, ambitious works for the artist: complex beadwork mapped on to large-scale panels of maple, birch and cherry veneer. This exhibition will thus resonate deeply with the core propositions of Whetung’s and wider Indigenous practice—the relationship of Indigenous reclamation, sovereignty and belonging to the environment—and simultaneously address many of the most crucial concerns facing the broader community in our time.

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