Acting Out, Claiming Space: Indigenous Performance Art Series
Terrance Houle, Skeena Reece, Jordan Bennett, and Tanya Lukin Linklater – 2011
In conjunction with the Queen’s Native Students Association, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre is proud to present the Acting Out, Claiming Space: Indigenous Performance Art Series.
Four nationally and internationally celebrated Aboriginal performance artists, Terrance Houle, Skeena Reece, Jordan Bennett and Tanya Lukin Linklater take part in the series curated by Daina Warren (Montana Cree) and Carla Taunton.
The artists have been asked to consider strategies of acting out and claiming space, and to engage with the question, what constitutes an “Indigenous space?” The artists will be performing new works and projects or ideas that are currently in development. This performance project centres around Indigenous cosmologies and the performance of stories and explores the way Indigenous peoples place themselves against chosen environments, whether it be home or reserve communities, urban spaces, traditional or spiritual realms, political or historical locales.
Modern Fuel would like to thank our partners and sponsors who helped make this festival happen: Four Directions Aboriginal Student Center, Queen’s Native Students Association, Queen’s University Art Department, Queen’s Society of Graduate and Professional Students, Queen’s Coalition Against Racial and Ethnic Discrimination, the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, Ontario Public Interest Research Group Kingston and Confederation Place Hotel.
About the Artists / Curators
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performance art and experimental choreography have been exhibited in Canada and United States. Her site-specific performances include frozen lakes, train containers, pulp mills, and city riverscapes. In 2009, she examined the controversial act of seal hunting for two performances: “Iqallusuurtartua” (for Le Lobe’s Art Nomade) and “Isuwiq-waq” (curated by Daina Warren for LIVE Biennale). In her “aiya!” series, she embodies sounds of deconstructed Alutiiq language amidst a textile installation. “aiya!” will be exhibited in rural communities in NWT, northern Ontario, and Saskatchewan in 2011. Tanya Lukin Linklater lives on Lake Nipissing in Northern Ontario. She was awarded the Chalmers Professional Development Grant in 2010 and nominated for the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in 2011.
Jordan Bennett is a multi-disciplinary artist of Mi’kmaq decent who calls the west coast of Newfoundland home. His work is derived from a combination of popular and traditional cultural reflections, which he portrays through his passion for and knowledge of pop culture, traditional craft, and his own cultural practices. He has recently developed an affinity for language, mainly directed towards learning his ancestors native tongue of Mi’kmaq. Through the processes of sculpture, digital media, text based media, installation, painting, and endurance performance, he strives to push boundaries and play with the ideas of re-appropriation, reclamation, participation and the artifact within traditional aboriginal craft, ceremony, and contemporary culture.
Skeena Reece (Tsimshian. Gitksan. Cree. Metis. Woman. Artist. Administrator.) is a multi-disciplinary artist based on Vancouver Island and performance work may include, music, spoken word and videography. Founder of the Native Youth Artists Collective, she has worked in Arts Administration since 2005. A self-named ‘Sacred Clown’ influenced by her ancestors, she is a storyteller. Her work has extended overseas at the 2010 Sydney Biennale: Festival of Contemporary Art in Australia and at the Bbeyond Gallery in Belfast, Ireland. Performing at community art shows, the main stage or at a cabaret, she has recently released an inaugural music CD.
Terrance Houle is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe. Involved with Aboriginal communities all his life, he has traveled to reservations throughout North America participating in Powwow dancing along with his native ceremonies. Houle utilizes at his discretion performance, photography, video/film, music and painting. Likewise Houle’s practice includes tools of mass dissemination such as billboards and vinyl bus signage. His work has been exhibited across Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe and England. Terrance Houle lives and maintains his art practice and Aboriginal Youth Mentorship in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Curator Carla Taunton is a PhD Candidate and a Teaching Fellow at Queen’s University in the Department of Art. She is an alliance member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and works as an independent curator. Her current research interests are Indigenous performance art and contemporary Indigenous visual culture; Indigenous resistance, interventions and activism in the arts; and globalization and decolonization theories. Her dissertation explores Indigenous performance art as acts of resistance and self-determination that participate in the project of decolonization. Recently, in June 2010, she worked as a statement gatherer at the National TRC Meeting in Winnipeg.
Curator Daina Warren is of the Montana Cree Nation from Alberta. She received her BA in 2003, graduating from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. In 2000, she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts’ Assistance to Aboriginal Curators for Residencies in the Visual Arts program to work at grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC, which then led to a permanent position with the artist-run centre as an associate curator and administrator until 2009. Warren has co-curated such projects as the New Forms Media Arts Festivals in 2004 and 2005 and the Earth Village for the World Urban Forum in 2006. She is also the curator of the online exhibitions “If these walls could talk” and “Contains Animal Byproducts,” created for the CODE Screen 2010 Vancouver Olympics project. Warren has most recently been awarded the Canada Council Aboriginal Curatorial Residency, where she will be working at the National Gallery until the summer of 2011.