In 1914, delegates of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission met with Johnny Scow (Kwikwasuti’nuxw), Copper Johnson (Ha’xwa’mis), Dick Webber and Dick Hawkins (Dzawada’enuxw), and Alec Morgan (Gwawa’enuxw), as well as all the Kwakwaka’wakw Chiefs, to establish the land base of the Kwakwaka’wakw group of nations. A century later, in May 2018, the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation launched the first-ever BC Supreme Court case to extend Aboriginal title to the ocean, claiming that the Province does not have the authority to grant tenures to salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. As two moments in a tangled timeline of resistance, these legal encounters bring forward the ways that cultural practices can bring new realities into being for a community experiencing ongoing social, cultural and ecological effects of colonization and globalizing economics.

Working together at Kingcome Inlet in the summer of 2018, a group of artists used film, video, social media, weaving, animation, drawing, language and song to address the urgent threats to the land and water. A manifestation of the relationships formed between the participants over this past year, this exhibition is based on sharing knowledges and respectful collaboration. Simultaneously research, material, media, testimony and ceremony, Hexsa’am: To Be Here Always challenges the Western concept that the power of art and culture are limited to the symbolic or metaphoric and that the practices of First Peoples are simply part of a past heritage. As Marianne Nicolson states, “We must not seek to erase the influence of globalizing Western culture, but master its forces selectively, as part of a wider Canadian and global community, for the health of the land and the cultures it supports. The embodied practice of ceremonial knowledge relates to artistic experience – not in the aesthetic sense, but in the performative: through gestures that consolidate and enhance knowledge for positive change.” Hexsa’am: To Be Here Always positions the gallery as an active location for this performance, creating generative exchange. Hexsa’am: To Be Here Always is a further iteration of the original exhibition at the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery from January 11 to April 7, 2019 as part of Mirrored In Stone, a project commissioned with Cineworks in partnership with the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation. The project was made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts New Chapter fund, the British Columbia Arts Council Youth Engagement Program, the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Foundation.

Working with local Secwépemc artist and curator Tania Willard, artists in the exhibition will attend the UBCO summer Indigenous art intensive, with visits to BUSH Gallery, a land-based gallery in Secwépemculecw. There will also be a focus on Syilx territory (Kelowna, BC) and collaboration with the Wild Salmon Caravan. This examination of intra-territoriality and art practice will compliment the exhibition’s concerns, connecting local issues and Indigenous lands through community networks and respectful relations.

Josh Allan, Deb Fong, Kazia Poore and Elizabeth Sigalet initiated a Polite Conversation in their final year as Bachelor of Fine Arts students at Thompson Rivers University. Coming from different perspectives and using different mediums, the four students began their project by employing a “call and response” approach as a way to step outside their own ways of working and to expand their methods of making art in an attempt to push the boundaries of their own practices.

Josh Allan’s practice is influenced by the grand narratives and graphic drawing found in comics. Deb Fong’s research takes her into the history of still life painting where she works beyond the flat canvas and brings a contemporary feminist perspective to the genre. Kazia Poore uses photography to explore personal expression through the gestural movement of people’s hands. Elizabeth Sigalet uses sourced material and photographic manipulation to investigate the relationship between the natural landscape and human engineering projects within it.

For their collaborative project at the Kamloops Art Gallery, the artists are executing call and response works within The Cube for the two-week installation period prior to the opening reception. This methodology plays off of Surrealist drawing games like the exquisite corpse, where multiple artists collaborate, responding to the previous artists’ work to create a finished work that focuses on the process as much as the result. To begin this project, each artist claims a wall of the gallery, initiating a call, then invites the other artists to respond. The responses are without guidelines or limitations, with each artist knowing their work may be added to, blotted out or erased completely and replaced by new work. Upon further discussion… is an exercise in multi-authorship and collaboration in an attempt to go deeper into the Polite Conversation that initiated the artists’ collaborations during their BFA studies.

The Kamloops Art Gallery is pleased to announce the realization of Donald Lawrence’s public artwork, Comet MMXVIII, 2018, on the new entrance to the Thompson-Nicola Regional District Building which houses the TNRD civic offices, the Kamloops Branch of the TNRD Library and the Kamloops Art Gallery. An illuminated work, Comet MMXVIII will light up as dusk arrives each evening. Interpretative material is on display in the building's atrium.

Comet MMXVIII was created for the Gallery’s Luminocity 2018 exhibition (luminocity.ca) and served as a beacon of light at Riverside Park during this evening festival of video projections and new media projects. Installed on top of the newly renovated TNRD entrance, this light sculpture will act as a beacon for this public building, marking it as a significant civic and cultural space in the city. It holds visual interest in the daytime and at night, celebrating this building as a key public space in downtown Kamloops and highlighting an exceptional example of local talent. The sculpture also serves as an opportunity to showcase a new work acquired for the Kamloops Art Gallery’s collection and visibly marks the excellence embodied in one of Kamloops’ principle cultural institutions. The sculpture is representative of the Gallery’s rigorous exhibition program and commitment to community engagement.

Donald Lawrence is a professor in the Visual Arts Program at Thompson Rivers University. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC and a Masters of Fine Arts from York University, Toronto, ON and exhibits his artwork nationally and internationally. Lawrence was the 2017 recipient of the Kamloops Mayor’s Award for the Arts Artist of the Year award and was the first Chair of the City of Kamloops’ Arts Commission.

Research for this sculpture draws upon Lawrence’s duel interest in solar phenomenon and optical devices. He referenced numerous books in this research and made sketches based on medieval imagery he sourced. These ephemeral resources will also be displayed in the entrance to the TNRD building to further inform visitors about the sculpture and Lawrence’s art practice, and to mirror the Library’s fundamental interest in books, their importance and history.