After moving to Chilcotin, South African artist Ann Nicholson began to learn the history of the Chilcotin War, and gained an understanding of the importance of this war in the lives of the people living there to this day as well as how much the social fabric of the area rests upon the tragic and painful events of 1864 and the colonial years leading up to them.

Nicholson created a body of work, The Chilcotin War: A Colonial Legacy, that traced the conditions leading up to the war during the Gold Rush, the Chilcotin people’s attempts to protect their historical rights to the gold and the land they occupied for centuries, the devastation inflicted on the Chilcotin people by small pox, rape, prostitution, and hunger born of oppression, attempts at negotiating peace, preparations by the Chilcotin people for war, the eventual hanging of five chiefs and the long-term effects of the war.

Growing up in South Africa, Nicholson is familiar with colonialism and its capacity for social destruction. In her youth while at art school in Johannesburg she met people who were connected to the liberation movement and the African National Congress, which was illegal at the time. She became involved in the anti-apartheid struggle and as a result was jailed for 3 years. After moving to Canada in 1974, Nicholson worked as a teacher in Vancouver for years before eventually settling in Chilcotin in 2005. She has a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and has exhibited her work across B.C. for the last 20 years.

In Perspective: The Chilcotin War: A Colonial Legacy

Interpretive Essay by Amberley John

 Ann Nicholson’s exhibition The Chilcotin War: A Colonial Legacy reinforced the importance of place. We viewers were brought to Chilcotin Country, a plateau and mountain region around Williams Lake, BC. Traditionally inhabited by the Tsilhqot’in Peoples, white colonists and road construction workers laid claim to the land. This aggression led to the Chilcotin War of 1864.

When non-Indigenous artists engage in Indigenous issues in their work, there is always the concern of cultural appropriation. It is the responsibility of the artist to consult with that nation, and be transparent and truthful in their work. Nicholson seems to have approached this subject matter with tact and respect.

Imagery in these paintings asks us to remember the events leading up to the Chilcotin War, and how they contribute to our current unresolved issues. Eyes stare back at you as you witness their truth. Arrows point in one direction in some paintings; in others they create chaos.

Many of the paintings feature a lower tier of Tsilhqot’in associations. This tier becomes increasingly suffocated, growing slimmer as the series progresses. In The Curse (the second to last paintingnext to Chief Ahan’s Grave) we see the chief calling out for his relatives to find him as plans currently progress to build a school on his remains in New Westminster. The Tsilhqot’in Peoples unequivocally have the right to the repatriation of Chief Ahan’s remains.

Winding intersecting paths in Roads to the Gold remind us of the difficult truth about hunger and greed. This hunger for gold and hunger for progress still exist. At the time of the Chilcotin War, the elders said that the 7th generation would have to withstand another onslaught from the white occupiers.

In June, 2014, plans to build a gold and copper mine at Fish Lake and convert many of its surrounding lakes into tailing ponds were brought to a triumphant halt. The Tsilhqot’in Nation was victorious in gaining Aboriginal Title to a 1900 km2 section of territory. This landmark victory halted what would have been the second largest mine in Canada.

Was this the onslaught the elders predicted? “Progress” like the Prosperity Gold and Copper Mines still today threatens the traditional ways of living of the Tsilhqot’in and many other Peoples. Looking back at the six generations before us, how do we embody what we have learned, and how can we use this knowledge to benefit the next seven generations?

she:koli swakwé;ku, kaniyew^na niyúkyats tahnon: ohkwali niwaki’taló:t^ tahnon on^yota’aka niwaku’hutsyot^ ni i. ki-low-na taknakehle.

In Phantom Limb, artist Shyra DeSouza created forms that behaved as traces of a physical body of some sort. Phantom Limb references something which is both part of us, and also separate from us, and therefore beyond our control. This is reflective of the consumer's relationship with the materials: discarded, once loved, decorative items that have lost their lustre. For this exhibition, the viewer was asked to extend the interpretation of the installation into the surrounding space, as one would when viewing dinosaur remains in a natural history museum. 

DeSouza works with found objects, attaching them at points and angles to create a larger sculptural form, with the individual objects dictating how they might be manipulated within the growing structure. The effect was one that was very labyrinthine with excessive form, but no apparent function. Each item was added in such a way that they began to erase one another, and take on forms reminiscent of mounted, overgrown deer antlers, or three-dimensional Rorschach forms. Each piece was highly symmetrical, and together created distinct spinal form. This consistent element of symmetry anchored these coveted objects in the sublime, and the desire to control that which is potentially frightening, and beyond our control. 

Shyra DeSouza is an interdisciplinary artist, originally from Calgary, and currently based in Berlin. She attended the Sculpture department at the Alberta College of Art & Design in Calgary, Canada, where she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts with distinction in 2006.

Her primary artistic interests lie in unravelling and reorganising the perceptions that characterise contemporary lived experience, utilising strategies and concepts such as: mimetic exacerbation, memento mori, pareidolia, ennui, and implication of the viewer to drive the development of her work. DeSouza’s practice encompasses a broad set of skills and materials, typically resulting in various forms of film, installation, and sculpture.

​She has screened/exhibited her work across Canada, in the United States, and in Europe. As well as maintaining an artistic studio practice, she has undertaken several volunteer administration and board roles within the Calgary arts community, and has been awarded a number of grants and residencies.

For more information on DeSouza and her work, visit her website.

Secondhand Luster

Interpretive Essay by Emily Green

While scrolling one’s gaze along Shyra De Souza’s Phantom Limb,
one cannot help but be guided through an organically unfolding sequence of forms that appear to evolve from one to the next. This string of apparent mutations gives us a sense of a natural continuum that feels whole, like the complete spinal column of a now dead creature. Meanwhile, logic and a closer consideration of the individual forms tells us that in fact the entire piece is a construction of discrete and disparate objects from our material culture. As viewers, we can sense logic in the piece that is familiar, yet strange. This sensation is not unlike that of a phantom limb: the feeling that an appendage of the body is existent and functioning, though it is actually not.

This liminal space between knowing and not fully knowing is a highly seductive zone in the experience of art - one that De Souza invites us into through the representational power of alluring forms. They suggest meaning without precisely naming it. Mahogany cabinetry with ornate brass fittings and the glossy milk-white curves of swan necks indulge the viewer in nostalgia for fading traditions of decoration and display. One might begin to wonder who these objects belonged to, and how the narrative of their acquisition, possession and abandonment unfolded. The individual identities and memories embedded in these objects point us in multiple directions. Yet the neutrality imposed by their white-washed surface treatment and symmetrical organization points us toward a conclusion, without fully getting us there.

Without security in conceptual or metaphorical meaning to firmly sink our teeth into, we are free to indulge in an appreciation of form, which arguably holds its own sense of value and meaning. In De Souza’s work, our attention is redirected to the aesthetic potential of these once-loved objects, as well as to the experiential potential of the piece in its entirety. By orchestrating these found objects into a theatrical form that sweeps through the gallery, we are reminded of how our bodies experience the work (not just our minds). De Souza suspends us with our thoughts and our bodies in a space of personalized meaning, where we can oscillate between being mentally and emotionally critical and simply being aesthetically seduced. We swing between metaphor and pure form, and suspicion and curiosity. Ultimately, we are perhaps left thinking about our role in the cycle of material consumption.

Subtle Emergences was an immersive, interactive art installation by David Kadish. The installation consisted of different elements - kinetic hanging “leaves”, sound-producing pipes, and misting patches - that formed an ecosystem of inorganic beings. As people moved about the space, the environment changed, lights waning in some places and waxing in others to reveal new perspectives of the space. The space responded to its visitors. As lights dim, the leaves slow and sounds rise from the pipes. As viewers explored the system, they became part of it.

The installation drew on the artist’s interest in complex systems and the phenomenon of emergence that they exhibit. Emergence occurs when relatively simple instructions produce complex patterns and displays, without the direction of a central coordinator. This is found all over the animal world, for example in the flocking patterns of birds, or the construction patterns of ant colonies. We also find plenty of examples of emergence in human society, from the operation of economic markets to the bottom-up construction and organization of the Internet.

Subtle Emergences allowed viewers to embed themselves into a complex, emergent system and explore the relationships that are formed between technology, environment, and ourselves. Emergent systems are unpredictable, so Subtle Emergences presents us with an opportunity to develop an embodied understanding of a system which we could not understand by analysis alone.

Subtle Emergences

Interpretive Essay by Jeannette Angel

Pause.
And you will experience a shift, a turn, curling, reaching, pulling
still... moving

The gallery space is transformed into an ecosystem of hanging fabric entities and copper sound outcroppings. They are fragile technological beings that are not animals, not plants and yet they invite us to care about them. One seems to breathe.

Why should we care? Clearly these beings do not need us. Our actions do not seem to trigger a direct response, although our presence can initiate events. There is nothing about the way things happen in the space that would suggest anything good or bad, predictable or leading to a particular end. We are immersed in a delicate space, participating in almost imperceptible change.

The work invites us to consider change as something that is surprising and delightful rather than only scary and cataclysmic.
It encourages us to be open to changes in our environment. We can learn to see the effects of our actions in their subtle emergences rather than only witnessing their overt consequences. Perhaps we can experience change as an opportunity for interdependent curiosity and exploration rather than forced growth and development.

The materials of the hanging fabric entities are soft, pliable and playfully suggestive of organic forms. The copper sound outcroppings flow from the wall, the floor, the ceiling, and bring
forth tones buried deep within their pipes. They may remind people of sculptural pieces from the fifties and sixties like the precariously balanced kinetic mobiles of Alexander Calder that move in response to the visitor.

However Subtle Emergences is related to its art antecedents, the objects spill into a contemporary network of associations through their interactive qualities. While acknowledging the relationship to the rhythmic fragility of Arthur Ganson’s whimsical machines, Kadish’s entities move, emit sounds and are illuminated through technological design. This impulse to use microcomputers to animate objects, embed wire coils in fabric and play with heat sensitive paint is undoubtedly supported by Kadish’s years as an engineering student, but also formative participation in interdisciplinary design projects.

The concept of interaction design, which investigates the dynamic relationship between humans and technology, has always been strongly featured in Kadish’s creative experiments. Subtle Emergences

introduces a new design element from ecology, the concept of complexity: a cluster of strands that weave in and out of one another, splitting and recombining, braiding and curling. In the gallery space,

designing complexity involves building a generative composition that is not necessarily cause and effect; your interaction with one hanging form may cause changes in another piece across the room.
This allows interactions to be affected by the dynamic participation of people, technological components and environmental factors. Sounds in the room activate the movement of the hanging entities, bodies in space disrupt shadows on the wall and words are revealed through changes in temperature.

This environment is charged with meanings that require a slow engagement in order to come into being. Bringing together art and science satisfies our human need to make sense of our world poetically.

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