BUSH Gallery
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis, born in Comox, Canada; lives in Vancouver, Canada), Peter Morin (Tāłtān, born in Telegraph Creek, Canada; lives in Victoria, Canada), and Tania Willard (Secwépemc, born in Kamloops, Canada; lives in Chase, Canada) form together this deployment of BUSH Gallery, a space created by an Indigenous-led collective of artists centred on Indigenous territory, experiences, and rights. BUSH Gallery explores ways in which art—its institutions, disciplines, and histories—can be modulated by centring Indigenous life, knowledge, traditions, and cultures. The collective offers decolonial, hierarchy-breaking methodologies based on epistemologies positing that bodies and spirits, like rivers, are in constant motion.
In the exhibition Diffracting. Of Light and of Land, BUSH Gallery probes the rhizomatic connections between light and land and their resulting ecologies. The project, part of which was produced in summer 2021 during a residency in Secwepemcúl̓ecw (on the Willard family property that is part of the Neskonlith reserve), examines alternative photographic processes and the political implications of site-specific creation. Emerging from their activation within the territory, the works bear witness to the influence of light on organic materials, undoubtedly altered as it passes—here, allowing a plant to nourish itself through photosynthesis; there becoming an archive of time spent on the land together. Building on these relationships, the project highlights the idea of network and questions of online circulation of photographic images, which are infinitely recycled on the Web. The process of fixation behind photography—the ultimate role of which is to freeze the movement of photons on film—contrasts sharply with the ephemeral, mobile images found on social networks. BUSH Gallery proposes a fixing of light on land as photographic process and circulates these images online as an expression of freedom from the boundaries of an Indian reservation. For example, the hashtag, emblematic of web culture, is reproduced, using survey paint, by the artists on the ground of the reserve, where there is still limited Internet access. In a subversive and committed way, BUSH Gallery asserts nature as inextricably bound to its representation, presuming that the nonliving and the living, including human beings, are not set apart from the environment around them. Diffracting. Of Light and of Land multiplies possible visions, each proposing sensitive responses to the world that surrounds us.