Jackson Polys

The SFU School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to welcome Jackson Polys as the 2022 Spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence.

As a key contributor to New Red Order, a public secret society, Polys has worked collaboratively to employ a multiplicity of swerving strategies than aim to approach questions around desires for Indigeneity: How to locate the persistence, the limits, and viability of those desires, manifest in recurrent settler colonial determinations and habits? How to ingest what might be seen as inappropriate urges to merge, in order to rechannel those desires into paths for the expansion of Indigenous growth and agency? Through the work of NRO, these questions open into an induction process, implicating and drawing in people of multiple subject positions, with varying proximities to Indigenous experience. As Indigeneity is actively produced as a commodity, what properties are we being made to consume?

During his time in Vancouver, Polys will present a free public lecture on his work. In conjunction with SCA faculty member Raymond Boisjoly, Polys will also work closely with third-year visual art students towards conceptualizing and creating work for the BFA Project, an annual student exhibition in the Audain Gallery. Culture/Cultural, this year’s BFA Project, explores the possibilities for research, theoretical orientations, and practice-based inquiries concerning culture in both its noun and adjectival forms. The work presented in Culture/Cultural takes up notions of the nature/culture divide, ideas of sociality, and negotiations of positionality and politics in a reflexive manner. Student work will look at how we come to understand the cultural world that binds us to others.

Events

Artist talk
January 20, 2022 | 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre

RSVP HERE

BFA Project 2022: Culture/Cultural
March 24 – April 2, 2022
Opening reception: March 23 | 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Audain Gallery

Biography

Jackson Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist from Tlingit territory, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. At an early age, he began carving with his father, Tlingit artist Nathan Jackson, from the Lukaax.ádi Clan of the Lk̲ óot K̲ wáan, and he belongs to the Dak̲ lʼaweidí Clan of the Chilkat K̲ wáan. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and was the recipient of a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society who, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co- produce video, performance, and installation works that examine and aim to shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. His individual and collaborative works have appeared at the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Artists Space, Burke Museum, eflux, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Images Festival, Kunstverein in Hamburg, MIT, MOMENTA Biennale de l'image, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Park Avenue Armory, Sundance Film Festival, Union Docs, Toronto Biennial of Art, Walker Arts Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.