But this empathy with the land has limits. What do shareholders and mine operators perceive as they level entire mountains? How are we reflected in tar sands operations that move more sediment in a year than all of the world's rivers combined? How do we understand the discrepancies between those who profit from extraction and those who feel the effects? Who is burdened with the role of witnessing and how much can they endure? We project our visages onto the land, but a Stone Witness sees it differently and can give testimony for millennia.

Through drawing, video, and sculpture, artworks by Abbas Akhavan, Tanya Busse, and Liljana Mead Martin consider human cultures of extraction in relation to geological time. Works in the exhibition include paintings made with organic light sensitive materials on paper made of stone, a video installation that conjures resistance to the resource extraction that fuels the military industrial complex, and sculptural works that trace connections between the body and the violence of the endless excavation and construction in the built environment.

This exhibition is set in a place with a very specific relationship to geology. Nanaimo, BC is a former coal mining town on the territory of the Snuneymuxw people, marked by petroglyphs carved in stone that speak to origin stories and cultural rights to the land, and undercut by mine shafts extracted through one hundred years of subaltern labour. That Nanaimo rides the northern edge of the Cascadia subduction zone makes the site of this exhibition even more resonant.

Thinking across geological time, Stone Witness takes place in a year in which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks what are generations?

 

Stone Witness: Talk and Tour

In 2006, she traveled to the Karl May Museum in Radebeul, Germany, where she met with 'The Band of Broken Arrows' one of many groups of German citizens who call themselves 'Indianer' inspired by the fictional novels of author Karl May. Indianer dress up in costume and perform what they imagine to be a North American Indigenous lifestyle. Stewart documented her experience during this trip, but waited to further develop the project.

It has now been thirteen years since Stewart's initial meeting with this community. After returning to Germany as an artist-in-residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, she reconnected with the group of Indianer she met during her first visit. The number of people in the community has significantly dropped, almost by half. However, the culture of appropriation continues on. This summer, she was invited to participate in a large gathering of nearly 1000 Indianer from all over Europe. Enacting a kind of inverted anthropology, Stewart developed a new body of work revolving around these encounters for her solo exhibition at Nanaimo Art Gallery. While Indianer communities may seem at a distance, this exhibition can also be a point of reflection on the legacies of cultural inequality in British Columbia.

Considering what happens when cultural appropriation becomes tradition, Krista Belle Stewart's project is the third exhibition in a year in which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question: what are generations?

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Berlin based Canadian writer Mitch Speed.

Image courtesy of Krista Belle Stewart

Seraphine, Seraphine Screening and Artist Talk

Join artist Krista Belle Stewart for a screening of her video work Seraphine, Seraphine (2014), in which Stewart interweaves a 1967 CBC docu-drama about the first Aboriginal public health nurse in B.C. with excerpts from a personal testimony from the 2013 Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Both parts of this video feature the same person: the artist's mother, Seraphine Stewart. Contrasting the narrative constructed by our national broadcaster nearly 50 years ago with Seraphine's recent testimony as a residential school survivor, Krista Belle Stewart activates the dual role of the artist as both voice and witness. After the screening, Stewart will discuss Seraphine, Seraphine, and other projects.

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