You’re Welcome
Jason Baerg, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Ange Loft, Logan MacDonald
A Space Windows
November 6, 2018 – January 19, 2019
Curated by: Ryan Rice
Public Presentation Panel on Thursday, January 10, 2019 from 7pm- 8:30pm.
Re:Place: An Inquiry is a panel discussion co-presented with A Space Gallery @ UrbanSpace Gallery, 401 Richmond St. Toronto ON. Urbanspace Gallery is located on the ground floor beside Trinity Square Video.
The welcome mat, a rug that is placed on the ground in front of one’s home, is repurposed by Indigenous artists Jason Baerg, Ange Loft, Vanessa Dion Fletcher and Logan MacDonald as a metaphorical device to initiate and locate narratives to place. For You’re Welcome, the mat becomes the site of contemplation to address shared spaces, Indigenous presence, the colonial affect and personal / collective relationships to land. Each artist activates their mat as a means to contemplate and illustrate the discourse around land acknowledgment and protocols, which recognizes stewardship, ownership and hints of hospitality.
Drawn from creative expression and curatorial practice bearing in mind mediative actions, Land is Where Your Feet Touch the Ground (#LIWYFTTG) is a curatorial investigation led by Ryan Rice to examine forms of visual literacy to place through lived experience and collective mappings. You’re Welcome is framed as a tangible collective work developed for #LIWYFTTG and is about listening, looking, imagining and locating the stories the land will tell us through interpretations by Indigenous artists who navigate Tkaronto on a daily basis.
Ange Loft, Jason Baerg, Logan MacDonald, Vanessa Dion Fletcher and Ryan Rice are creative minds who embody the diversity Indigeneity offers. Individually and collectively, they activate and centre themselves on the land – in life, love, creation, and community.
#LIWYFTTG is supported by the Toronto Arts Council with funding from the City of Toronto.
Jason Baerg
Âpisisin ᐋᐱᓯᓯᐣ S/he Revives, 2018
As I overlook the city from my balcony, I see nine building cranes developing new high-rise condos on this rapidly changing skyline. I can’t help but embody the understanding that I am a Cree Métis visitor on this territory that is governed by the Dish with One Spoon Treaty. I wish I could return the spoon back to the bowl and witness another Indigenous person take the spoon, knowing that this Indigenous person owned a condo here in Tkaronto.
Not one – I know, not one Indigenous person who owns a condo in this city.
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
Be Careful Where You Step, 2018
Walking through Toronto with a friend, they point out a bushy green plant and tell me its named Lambs Quarter – part of the goosefoot family. You can eat the stock seeds and leaves. Many people think its a weed but its an important food that grows everywhere from gardens to pavement cracks. I found the Lenape name is waxkanúsak. Now that I know what it is I see it everywhere and eat a leaf or two.
Porcupines have 30,000 quills that are their primary defense against predators. Given the way my indigenous ancestors and our land has been treated Be Careful Where You Step is an essential reminder of the potential harm, protection, and healing that can be present in the land.
Ange Loft
In Case I Gotta Walk Back, 2018
My nation’s territory extends beyond Montreal, Toronto and New York City. How nice of the highways, railways and borders to run through our towns. How clear the path, moving along the side of the highway, leads back home.
My work deals with Haudenosaunee history, symbolism and buried narratives of displacement and resistance. Through arts based research, talking and sewing, I endeavour to name what is missing, draw attention to the changes and to reconstruct belonging.
Logan MacDonald
Made Space, 2018
This series of photographs was conceived out of considerations around how queer and Indigenous bodies are monitored and visibly minimized in public spaces. Trees act as an analogy to locate vulnerable identities that are easily removed to make room for more infrastructure, a better view, an industrious purpose or to make space for another body.
Made Space lyrically considers those who were here before and provokes an opportunity to honour the bodies that have been displaced and targeted as too unattractive, vulnerable, diseased or dangerous. The work also questions how some of us are welcomed to use space, while other bodies, certain bodies, who have their roots firm in the ground, are not welcomed at all.
Biographies
Jason Baerg is an Indigenous curator, educator, and visual artist. Recent curatorial projects include exhibitions with Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and the University of Toronto. Baerg graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University. He currently is teaching as the Assistant Professor in Indigenous Practices in Contemporary Painting and Media Art at OCAD University. Dedicated to community development, he founded and incorporated the Metis Artist Collective and has served as volunteer Chair for such organizations as the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition. Creatively, as a visual artist, he pushes new boundaries in digital interventions in drawing, painting and new media installation. Recent international solo exhibitions include the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and the Digital Dome at the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jason Baerg has adjudicated numerous art juries and won awards through such facilitators as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and The Toronto Arts Council. For more information about his work, please visit Jasonbaerg.info.
Vanessa Dion Fletcher employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual
blood to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally.
She links these ideas to personal experiences with language, fluency, and
understanding. All of these themes are brought together in the context of her
Potawatomi and Lenape ancestry, and her learning disability caused by a lack
of short-term memory. Dion Fletcher graduated from The School of The Art
Institute of Chicago with an MFA.
Ange Loft is the Associate Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre, a multi-disciplinary artist and a performer from Kahnawake, Kanienkahaka Territory. Ange is an advisor for the Toronto Biennial and for the City of Toronto Indigenous Creative Culture Fund. She’s an ardent collaborator, facilitator and mentor working in storyweaving, arts based research, wearable sculpture and Haudenosaunee history. She is also a vocalist with the band YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN.
Logan MacDonald is a queer visual artist and curator from Newfoundland, Canada.
He identifies as a settler with European/Mi’kmaq ancestry. He is part of a unique, yet growing community of settler-identified, newly federally-acknowledged Mi’kmaq from Newfoundland who are looking at ways to revive their culture. MacDonald holds a
BFA from Concordia University (2006) and a MFA from York University (2010). His
artwork has exhibited worldwide, notably with his recent solo exhibition The Lay of the
Land. He is currently teaching at McMaster University.
Ryan Rice is a Mohawk of Kahnawake and an independent curator. He received a MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, New York, graduated from Concordia University with a BFA, and received an Associate of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts, New Mexico. Rice is co-founder and coordinator of Nation To Nation, and co-founder and director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective.