Inspired by the matriarchs who give ROSEMARY its namesake, ROSEMARY SKOOL looks to kindle moments of engagement that support our cultural values of fierce love, humility, and courage. Thinking about the homes of these matriarchs, ROSEMARY SKOOL strives towards the cultivation of spaces for gathering that are welcoming and generous to all our relations to build knowledge together. ROSEMARY SKOOL operates without cost to the public or to artists, providing an opportunity which ensures fair pay to arts workers. Its operations are Indigenous-led, through ROSEMARY Gallery. It works in critical discussion with, existing institutional models of equity and diversity initiatives to press for meaningful engagement with underrepresented communities in the arts.
co-curated by Jaimie Isaac and Suzanne Morrissette
Artists:
KC Adams
Ian August
Claire Johnston
Casey Koyczan
Pat Lazo
Kent Monkman
Bret Parenteau
Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
Rhayne Vermette
The merging of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers has long been a site of gathering. Whereas historically it has served as a meeting place and trade centre, the rivers today stand in for the symbolic act of gathering with guests from all directions and hosts from Treaty 1 territory. They are also sites of profound relationships to ongoing disapora. They are also sites where the city’s relationship to its most vulnerable is made most apparent. These are matters which our communities have organized around for many years.
Confluence is an exhibition which brings together artists who are active in the city of Winnipeg in 2024, in synergy with the city’s 150th anniversary, ushering a time to reflect on histories of the city, projection of future and understand the present’s needs, priorities, and values of artists and communities within the city and their relationships to one another and their communities.
curated by Suzanne Morrissette
Artists:
KC Adams
Anong Beam
Panya Clark Espinal
Melissa General
Dana Prieto
Krista Belle Stewart
This question guides the exhibition with a suggestion that the way we learn imparts an opportunity of acquaintance with possibility. It suggests that one’s approach to getting to know someone, or something, can influence the nature of that future relationship and the degree to which we are able to acknowledge and validate that which lies outside of our own experiences. Thinking about art practices that highlight the animacy of clay and land-based materials can, in this way, support a discussion about how we understand relationships between human and non-human beings, and the unique social and political contexts in which we are not only situated but with which we are in relation. This is an ethic of learning that is rooted in understandings of the animacy of the land and of our own states of belonging, of being out-of-place, or, of being in complex relations of power and history in an ever-changing world.
works by Carl Beam, Merritt Johnson and Fallon Simard
Prefix Gallery, Toronto
curated by Suzanne Morrissette
October 4 - November 24, 2018
Reception: October 19, 2018 from 8-10pm
Despite the public perception of improved Indigenous/state relations - most often contained, referred to, and promoted in terms such as reconciliation, as well as economic and social partnership and consultation - Indigenous people continue to live and work under conditions contained by the normative and acceptable standards and definitions of Western society. The territorial sovereignty claimed by settler nations is facilitated by ideas drawn from Western liberal thought, within which Indigenous re/claiming of lands through acts of political presence grounded in an ancestral knowledge of rights and responsibilities to the land, and either related on a nation-to-nation basis or superseding settler nations relationships to territory, are rendered illiberal. In other words, Indigenous people are often perceived as "bad liberals," incapable of managing the conditions of modern life and calling into question the freedoms and equality of so-called "everyday citizens."
This exhibition problematizes these conditions by orienting audiences towards an understanding of the ways in which perceptions of Indigenous political knowledge have been constructed along historical lines that are deeply influenced by relations of power. Artists included in this exhibition contribute to this conversation, through the illustration and denaturalization of systems of colonial thought that continue to inflect upon Indigenous peoples' expressions of political agency in the present. They accomplish this through the use of photo- and digital- media through which they imagine new modes of engagement and expressions of political agency. Their works identify and challenge the above conditions, while offering solutions for creating more just forms of co-existence that are based within Indigenous thought.
