Articulating the Complexities of the Travelling Exhibition

Event: Articulating the complexities of the Travelling Exhibition

Genre: Curator's talk

Speaker: Peter Morin

Time: 7:00 p.m.

Place: Open Space, 510 Fort Street

Articulating the Complexities of the Travelling Exhibition

Tahltan Curator-in-residence Peter Morin will discuss the complexities of his curatorial project Travelling Exhibition on July 17 at 7:00 p.m. This serialized exhibition honours the tradition of travel on the land.

Since October 2011, the Travelling Exhibition has unfolded with a series of artworks from eleven of Canada’s top indigenous artists: Marianne Nicholson, Lindsay Delaronde, Joe David, George Littlechild, Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Tania Willard, Emilio Portal, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Cathi Charles Wherry, Tanya Lukin-Linklater, and Robin Brass. This perceptive curatorial project invokes traditions connected to travelling and gathering on the land. Each artist has lent his or her artwork as a story that both narrates and navigates the land. One example is Cathi Charles Wherry’s twelve-foot line drawing of a prominent geographical feature of Vancouver Island, drawn entirely of braided sweetgrass and porcupine quills. Her work draws us into the land through landscape, scented by the sweetgrass, annotated with her personal associations and protected by the quills.

Another feature of the Travelling Exhibition is the unusual way the artists’ fees have been paid. Inspired by the histories of trade and exchange, or, put another way, the moment that shapes the meeting between two people on the land, Morin’s curatorial project included bartering the artists’ fees. Morin arranged a hybrid of art gallery systems of exchange and aboriginal economies. During the project, Morin traded one of his own artworks with each of the exhibiting artists for the privilege of exhibition.