Camille Turner and Cheryl L’Hirondelle Featured in Canadian Art, LandMarks2017
10 Artworks Coming Soon to Canada’s National Parks
(Excerpts reposted from the Canadian Art website)
A preview of LandMarks2017/Repères2017, which will install 10 artworks in Canada's national parks on the occasion of the country's sesquicentennial.
Coming this June, LandMarks2017/Repères2017 is a network of collaborative, contemporary art projects across Canada’s national parks on the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation in 2017.
Curated by David Diviney, Ariella Pahlke and Melinda Spooner (a.k.a. ACT), Véronique Leblanc, Natalia Lebedinskaia, Kathleen Ritter and Tania Willard, this wide-ranging endeavour, which spans from coast to coast, offers some site-specific responses to the notion of Canada 150.
“This anniversary marks an occasion to reflect on a land much older than 150 years, and to address the legacies of colonialism, the complex relationship between nationhood and cultural identity, as well as our relationship to nature in the face of present-day environmental and climatic crises,” say the curators. “Using art as a catalyst for discourse and social change, LandMarks2017/Repères2017 looks forward, and provides an opportunity to imagine, to speculate and to invent our futures through the eyes of artists, art students, communities and through the spirit of the land.”
Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner, Thousand Islands National Park, The Words That Come Before All Else, June 2016. Photo: Cheryl L’Hirondelle.
CHERYL L’HIRONDELLE AND CAMILLE TURNER’S FREEDOM TOURS AT THOUSAND ISLANDS NATIONAL PARK AND ROUGE NATIONAL URBAN PARK IN ONTARIO
When conducting site research for their project, artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner went on tours through Thousand Islands National Park. The artists’ individual practices are each concerned with walking, touring, questioning archives and uncovering alternative histories, particularly in regards to black and Cree worldviews. The artists found that the tours they took were largely informed by dominant (which is to say settler) narratives of Canadian history.
For their collaborative project, they are creating space, as curator Tania Willard describes, “for more stories to be heard, and more voices to be reflected.” The artists will host a boat tour through Thousand Islands National Park (the oldest park east of the Rockies) from June 16 to 18, 2017, then travel to Rouge National Urban Park (Canada’s newest park), where they will conduct walking tours on June 24 and 25, 2017. Look for booking information online at landmarks2017.ca.
The audio tours will remain available after the exhibition period, continuing to exist as performative and participatory artworks each time they are activated by visitors to the parks. Curated by Tania Willard.