Onenh dwa' den' dya - Now Let us proceed is an expanded photo-based installation by Greg Staats: Skarù:reˀ [Tuscarora] / Kanien’kehá:ka [Mohawk], Hodinöhsö:ni’. b. 1963, Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Bringing together new and existing works, the exhibition centres around a Hodinöhsö:ni restorative aesthetic employs mnemonics of condolence, articulated in visual forms that hold body and place including: oral transmission, text works, embodied wampum, photography, sculpture, video and installation. Staats' practice conceptualizes Land as monument embodied within a continuum of relational placemaking with his on-reserve lived experience, trauma, and the explorations of ceremonial orality. Staats’ lens based language documents cycles of return towards a complete Onkwehón:we neha [our original ways] positionality, reciprocity and worldview.
Curated by Leila Timmins
For more information read Onenh dwa’ den’ dya—Now Let us Proceed with Greg Staats, an essay by curator Leila Timmins. View digital project Brunch talk with Greg Staats and Leila Timmins on G44 Digital.
Greg Staats, actively exhibiting since 1986, studied Applied Photography at Sheridan College and is the recipient of the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. Staats has exhibited widely throughout Canada: including articule, Montreal; Walter Philips Gallery, Banff; Mercer Union; Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Gallery TPW, Toronto; McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton; Art Gallery of Ontario; and Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Sante Fe. Staats served as Faculty for two Aboriginal Visual Arts Residencies at the Banff Centre. (2009, 2010) His work is in the collections of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ottawa, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery among others. Staats has worked as an artist in residence with AGYU CIA#3, Images Festival/Trinity Square Video, Open Studio and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His work has been published in Prefix Magazine; C Magazine; BlackFlash and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, by Martha Langford.
Leila Timmins is a curator based in Toronto. She is currently the Curator and Manager, Exhibitions and Collections at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and is a founding member of the EMILIA-AMALIA feminist working group.
