Plug In ICA Summer Institute Session II:
August 7-24, 2018
BUSH gallery:  “Site/ation”

For Session II of our Summer Institute, post-graduate research program, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is excited to partner with BUSH gallery. Over three weeks, from August 7-24, Tania Willard, Peter Morin and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill will lead Site/ation, pushing a radical approach to curating and art making, born from active engagements and lived experiences on the land, land marking, contemporary art, the reserve, and the gallery. Using Indigenous methodologies to build a transformational space, that is open to everyone, BUSH seeks to de-centre the gallery, and the city as epicentres of contemporary art.

BUSH gallery Project 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. Participants will camp on the land together, read relevant texts, go for walks on the land, dream new relationships, and will research and learn by making and doing.

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 will 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.