Rain Cabana-Boucher: Distance

Rain Cabana-Boucher is a Michif/British settler who grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, treaty 6 territory. She completed a BFA at the University of Victoria in 2019. Since then, she has received a number of grants, including most recently a Digital Grant from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council. Distance will be her second solo outing in 2021. Earlier this year she exhibited her beadwork project Laying Flowers at Victoria’s Rockslide Gallery. Cabana-Boucher is beading tiny orange flowers – one for each of the unmarked graves found so far – to honour the children lost to the residential school system.

Distance will be a multimedia exhibition of new works, including sculpture, paintings and drawings. Cabana-Boucher describes her work as autobiographical. In this show, she explores the complexities of living and working as an Indigenous/settler artist on lands that are not her own. She says, “The works I’ll be showing are a self-reflection on my own observations of place and connections. They are dialogues of family, land, power structures and nationhood.”

She explains: “Much of my work utilizes implied line in order to obscure personal aspects and challenge the viewer to finalize the image and find their own experiences within the drawing. The works, especially the charcoal drawings, invoke a sense of fleetingness akin to recalling a memory. They are often sombre in nature due to a feeling of reflection and longing that accompanies the personal experiences from which the work is drawn.”

Opening reception Sep 10, 7-9pm

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