"My investigation for this work grapples with the body, my body as it has witnessed material and metaphysical landscapes changing and continually impacted, shaken and consumed by corporate resource extraction. I critique how the value of land and natural resources are created and assessed through Western measures-of-wealth (social, economical, environmental, power, ownership) and how these types of evaluations impact traditional and contemporary cultural production in the Canadian wilderness, which is still considered an untapped frontier for natural resources. My Praxis is sparked by strategies of Indigenous resistance to neo-colonization, the embodied knowledge and everyday acts of decolonization as ways to understand the imaginary Canadian true-north and industrial reverberations felt by those who live downstream." - Tsēma Tamara Skubovius
Ore Body investigates material and metaphysical landscapes from an embodied perspective, critiquing how valuation of land and resources are created and assessed through Western measures of wealth. Featuring a new series of large-scale lightboxes with images of multicoloured obsidian, a gem-like rock formed from cooling layers of lava found near Skubovius' family home in Northern BC, the exhibition explores bodily connections to land the impacts of resource extraction.
Presented in partnership with:
ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival
Tsēma Tamara Skubovius is an interdisciplinary artist and member of the Tahltan First Nation. She studied Northwest Coast Formline Design at K’saan (2005/06), has a BFA from ECUAD (2011) and MFA from OCADu (2016). Tsēma has shown in the notable group show, Interweavings for emerging First Nations artists who have previously won a YVR Art Foundation scholarship (RAG 2014/15) and was recently selected for Culture Shift, Contemporary Indigenous Art Biennale in Montreal (2016). Tsēma graduated from the Interdisciplinary Master's in Art, Media and Design program at OCADu showing her thesis work, LAND|MINE that connects materials to mine sites and bodies to the land.
