Art Collaborations as Creative Care
5 April 2021
Art Collaborations as Creative Care is a presentation and discussion by David Garneau and Sandra Semchuk.
When: April 20, 2021, 5:00 - 6:30 pm.
Description: Sandra Semchuk will speak about the collaborative project, "understoryoverstory," done in dialogue with her late husband, Rock Cree orator, poet and artist, James Nicholas, and her late father, Martin Semchuk, about a road built into northern Saskatchewan. David Garneau will speak about the Tawatina Bridge art project. He and his team, in consultation with Métis and First Nations Elders and Knowledge Keepers, produced 400 paintings for the new bridge in Edmonton. Both will discuss art collaborations as creative care.
Moderator: Chelsea Vowel
To register for this Zoom webinar, click HERE
View the poster (PDF) here.
Presenters:
David Garneau (Métis) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and critical writing. He is interested in creative expressions of contemporary Indigenous identities. Garneau recently curated Kahwatsiretátie: The Contemporary Native Art Biennial (Montreal, 2020) with assistance from Faye Mullen and rudi aker; co-curated, with Kathleen Ash Milby, Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2017); With Secrecy and Despatch, with Tess Allas, an international exhibition about massacres of Indigenous people, and memorialization, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, Australia (2016); and Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee, an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools, other forms of aggressive assimilation, and (re)conciliation, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina (2015). His paintings are in numerous public and private collections.
Photographer and scholar, Sandra Semchuk is a second generation Ukrainian Canadian who was a 2018 Governor General Award recipient in Visual and Media Arts. Semchuk has focused her photographic and video work on relationships between herself, her family, and her community. She collaborated with her late husband James Nicholas, Cree writer and orator, on photographic, text and video works to disrupt myths that have shaped settler relations to First Nations. A major exhibition of these collaborations is currently at the McKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, SK and will travel nationally. Recent photographic and video works engage the wider-than-human—the forest—and the overtone singing of Jerry DesVoignes to provide a larger context for local, global human narratives, personal and collective stories. Her artist’s book, The Stories Were Not Told, Canada’s First World War Internment Camps creates a space for internees and descendants to tell their stories.