shnu’a’th, ᐊᑳᒥᕽ akâmihk, the other side

A measure of how much visual art has changed this century lies in what we no longer ask of it. Today it is quaint to ponder, Is painting dead?, as we did periodically after Marcel Duchamp set aside his brushes for the readymade in 1912. But is photography dead? Put another way, re-photography is flourishing, as evidenced by the recent work of Zinnia Naqvi and Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, both past winners of the National Gallery of Canada New Generation Photography Award. I would add to this subgenre the interventionist photography of Michelle Sound and Eliot White-Hill, Kwulasultun, as seen in their current exhibition shnu’a’th, ᐊᑳᒥᕽ akâmihk, the other side.

Though the exhibition title, set in Hul’qumi’num, Cree and English, is intended to suggest physical proximity (the other side of the river) and spiritual proximity (the afterlife), it could also include formal proximity (methodology) through digital intervention, in the case of White-Hill, or analog, with respect to Sound. Thematically, the exhibition is concerned with relations between land, family and ancestors.

The punctum moment in White-Hill’s Squpastul (Gathering) (2024) centres on a downcast child on a beach amidst a gathering of canoes. While the photograph is archival (early 20th century), the drawn bright orange figure extending a consoling hand to the child is digital, making this as much a hybrid work as a reminder that the first time these two figures met was in the otherworld of the computer. In Sound’s work, it is the hard-copy family photo whose torn hole (wound) is not drawn together by stitches but held open (in grief) by threaded porcupine quills, when not scabbed over in plastic beads. In mother tongue (2024), Sound consoles her subjects with a caterpillar of dyed mink pompoms.

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