CUSTOM MADE / TSITSLEM TE STEM TE CK'ULTENS-KUC
Brian Jungen
Bev Koski
Mike MacDonald
Amy Malbeuf
Divya Mehra
Peter Morin
Nadia Myre
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Wendy Red Star
Charlene Vickers
Elizabeth Nutaraluk Aulatjut
Rebecca Belmore
Hannah Claus
Wally Dion
Phil Gray
Maggie Groat
Maureen Gruben
Gabrielle Hill
Merritt Johnson
Ursula Johnson
Central Gallery
June 27 to September 12, 2015
Curated by Kamloops Art Gallery, Canada Council Aboriginal Curator in Residence, Tania Willard
CUSTOM MADE / Tsitslem te stem te ck'ultens-kuc focuses on artists referencing skills-based artistic production within a contemporary and transformative context. The exhibition explores the ways in which artists are manipulating, transposing and re-learning skills-based arts like beadwork and basketry and how they are relating these skills to cultural heritage, new materials, concepts and techniques. CUSTOM MADE frames a dialogue between artists whose works cross boundaries, challenging and conflating binaries of art and craft, both contemporary and traditional.
Artists in the exhibition employ unconventional forms, contrasting natural and commercial materials, digital technologies and found objects to investigate notions of materiality, identity and culture through forms such as performance, basketry quilting and kinetic art. More than a beautiful object, cultural display or decorative painting, these works embody concepts of cultural knowledge(s), sustainability, global production and politics in experimental forms. Together these distinct works and artistic practices reveal ways in which simultaneous shifts across cultural zones value and recognize practices that are rooted in culturally informed tradition within a transformed, translated and transmuted contemporary artistic context.
The exhibition features important works such as Ayumee-aawach Oomama- mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991) by Rebecca Belmore, a sculptural and audio work that seeks to locate political protest as poetic action. It also includes leading contemporary artists not often shown in Kamloops as a way of opening up spaces to consider works that engage community, where the performative, the customary and the conceptual infuse the art object. CUSTOM MADE assembles a complex narrative of artist, object, process, community and concept as a generative act of interrupting the spaces between convention and innovation.
Generously sponsored by MCM Real Estate Ltd.
Nadia Myre
Meditations on Red #1-5, 2013
digital prints mounted under plexiglass
122 cm diameters
Courtesy of gallery Art Mûr
Photo: Devon Lindsay
CUSTOM MADE / Tsitslem te stem te ck'ultens-kuc
As a supplement to the Kamloops Art Gallery’s exhibition CUSTOM MADE, the KAG has produced an online pdf reference providing an essay by Tania Willard, Canada Council Aboriginal Curator in Residence, and a list of works and artists included in the exhibition. Designed by Ross Macaulay.