Aaron Leon
(Secwépemc)
Splatsin, Secwepemcúl̓ecw, 1989
Currently based in Armstrong, BC, Secwépemc Territory
7⟨ʔ⟩: Reciprocity Values
2021
video installation
Commissioned by the Kamloops Art Gallery
Collection of the Artist
This work builds on Aaron Leon’s explorations of time, light, and wavelength. Drawing on early photography and using an additive process, Leon’s imagery plays with layers of red, green, and blue light in the image, shifting the reciprocity values to create different light effects. The videos appear as fixed yet subtly moving images, reflecting our engagement with the land.
“I set up the camera and the land does the rest through collaboration. I allow the land to retake itself from the ‘landscape.’ What happens to our relationship to the land if we feel it has its own autonomy, its own sentience? How will our relationship with it change? How do we engage in our own values of reciprocity with the land?
The accompanying audio track is a result of recordings while in the field, of wind, of the landscape, what it was telling me. I was also thinking about my work in language and our goal to document our dialect in Splatsin, and how language evolves because of the land. The audio track shares my grandmother’s words in Secwepemcstín and English.
These words come from the dictionary as a form of how we learn now, how we have adapted our learnings from the land to learning in a Western context. The words focus on the glottal stop found in our language, something that isn’t found regularly in the English language. This glottal stop is represented by the number 7 or ⟨ʔ⟩ in the international phonetic alphabet. Originally, there were no characters for glottal stop on the typewriter so a 7 was used instead.”
Aaron Leon is from Splatsin where he grew up in the town of Armstrong. Leon attended Concordia University where he received his BFA with a major in photography and oversees the media needs of the Language and Cultural Program of the Splatsin Tsm7aksaltn Teaching Centre. He is helping to preserve the Splatsin dialect of Secwepemctsín in which there are less than 1% of fluent speakers left. Leon has been focusing on promoting a healthier community through arts and culture, by helping organise art and culture workshops at Splatsin. He has worked in community theatre and currently sits on the board of directors for Caravan Farm Theatre.
Interested in exploring identity and Indigenous history, Leon is currently attending UBC Okanagan in the Interdisciplinary Graduate program researching Secwépemc histories and stories in hopes of learning more about how Indigenous People can protect knowledge digitally, and keep intact the importance of responsibility, respect, and reciprocity in the digital world.
Resources for Further Research
Additional information and writings about Aaron Leon.
Aaron Leon, 7⟨ʔ⟩: Reciprocity Values, 2021. Video still.