Residency documentation of Outdoor School at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, led by Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato, 2018. Photo: Tania Willard.
Workshop: Site/ations
Facilitated by Tania Willard
Wednesday, October 14, 5:30pm PDT
Presented on Zoom
This workshop is free but space is limited. Please contact audaingallery@sfu.ca to register.
Activated in Tania Willard’s exhibition Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire and woven throughout her practice are concerns for the intersections of art making, land, Indigenous art histories and interventions into colonial logics. In this workshop, the artist will expand upon her idea of Site/ation, which is a concerted practice of giving voice to the knowledge contained in the land. In this collective exercise, participants will be invited to author and share their own Site/ation, taking account of their presence (their identity), place (where they are / from / going) and practices (the ways they make their life) in relation to Indigenous land, history and ideas of collective futurity.
Participants are encouraged to read the BUSH gallery manifesto, which is co-authored by Willard, ahead of the workshop. It is available here.
Tania Willard, Secwépemc Nation and settler heritage, works with shifting ideas around what is considered contemporary and traditional, often invoking bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in the intersections between Secwepémc knowledges and other cultures. As an artist, Willard’s work has been shown widely across Canada, including solo exhibitions with Kamloops Art Gallery (2009) and Burnaby Art Gallery (2017). Willard's ongoing collaborative project, BUSH gallery, is a conceptual land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges. Willard is an Assistant Professor at UBC Okanagan in Syilx territories, and her current research intersects with land-based art practices.