Summer Institute Session II: Public Talk, Site/ation with BUSH gallery

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to host a talk by BUSH gallery (Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin and Tania Willard) as part of the public programming for Site/ation, session two of our 2018 Summer Institute program, facilitated by the experimental curatorial and artist collective, BUSH gallery. Everyone welcome! 

BUSH gallery statement:

BUSH gallery acknowledges the Indigenous Nations that have ancestral ties to the Treaty 1 Territory and the Métis Nation homeland. As uninvited guests,* we strive to connect what we are doing as Indigenous artists with valuing and circulating within local Indigenous economies and communities, while also creating space for conceptual, experimental and performative land-based Indigenous led contemporary art. By practicing reciprocity and value-based systems of Indigenous knowledges, centred by our specific cultural backgrounds, we make galleries of thought, colour, land, sky, text and interrelationality.

The 2018 summer intensive with Plug In ICA enacts ideas of site/ation. How are we influenced, challenged, changed and politically tied to the lands in our communities and in our orbits?

Using art as strategy to guide resources and value Indigenous led spaces that acknowledge the land as the first gallery, as our gallery as BUSH gallery we come together to laugh, to make, to eat and to conjure ideas and dreams that will feed the ancestors. 

BUSH gallery functions as a space that allows for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous customs, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. BUSH gallery is a trans-conceptual galleryspace. Trans-conceptual repositions ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. The trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux. Never settling like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices, which are born out of a lived connection to the land.

* When we use ‘uninvited guest’ it means we acknowledge that due to dispossession of Indigenous lands and territories across Canada we operate outside of protocols that would make the local territory we are visiting within the authority of the traditional Indigenous land rights holder.