Setting: land

click here to view exhibition text

works by Kevin Lee Burton, Kaoru Ryan Klatt, Anna Tsouhlarakis, and Kade Twist
Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay
April 7th -May 27th, 2012
AFrame Gallery, Sioux Lookout
2013
Tom Thomson Gallery, Owen Sound
January 12 - March 23, 2014
Grimsby Art Gallery, Grimsby
2014
Judith and Norman Alix Gallery, Sarnia
curated by Suzanne Morrissette
February 6 - May 3, 2015

Setting: land brings together works by four artists - Kevin Lee Burton (Winnipeg, Manitoba), Kaoru Ryan Klatt (Winnipeg, Manitoba), Kade Twist (Phoenix, Arizona), and Anna Tsouhlarakis (Washington, DC). Through their video and installation-based artworks, each artist considers land as both a source of inspiration and a setting for enacting stories and experiences. By examining variations of this theme, the artists in Setting: land each engage their work within different sites and locations through highly specific and speculative actions. For instance, Anna Tshoularakis’s short video Navagation (2002) depicts the artist walking blindfolded from her studio to her former residence in Maine, prodding her surroundings and placing trust in her own innate “Indian” sense of direction. In the video Nikamowin (Song) (2007), artist Kevin Lee Burton charts his own journey through various terrains through the narration of remixed Cree dialogue. Kade Twist’s positioning of present day Phoenix in Our Land, Your Imagination: The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific Worldview and Phoenix (2008) provides a melancholic vision of a city that has been settled on Indigenous land. In a place far more remote, but no less settled, Kaoru Ryan Klatt’s Yulaska (2007) tells the story of a personal trip taken through the Yukon Territory and the state of Alaska towards the Arctic Circle which consciously blurs the boundary between fiction and reality. Together the works in this exhibition activate discussions around the various histories that have become lodged in the land and that continue to affect our lives in the present.