In May of 2010 I was granted a Residency by the Fine Arts Reading Room, at Concordia University. The first of its kind, myself and Sarah Nesbitt were the guinea pig girls for the project, and we were LUCKY to be so.
The freedom they granted us in our research-based Residency allowed us both to explore this concept of the white Canadian settler identity by traveling West - myself to Saskatchewan and Sarah all the way to the Terrible Tar Sands of Alberta, where she found canons being blown from ponds of toxic waste - this was to keep birds from landing in these cesspools and thus environmentalists at bay.
We were then asked to present work that incorporated our research - I learned so much in traveling westwards in a beat up '94 Mazda, it was hard to consolidate. Yet we managed to pull off a very successful exhibition entitled Home on the Range, shown at Concordia's VAV gallery in October of 2010.
Chief Joseph
I am not a child, I think for myself. No man can think for me.
The earth and myself are of one mind.
It does not require many words to speak the truth.
The white men… would change the rivers and mountains if they did not suit them.
Below was a piece entitled Whose Land? I made with watercolor and pencil on the wall, using texts from multiple sources and some slides I had come across:
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