Jeneen Frei Njootli: my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money

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Jeneen Frei Njootli, "wind sucked through bared teeth (detail)," 2017

Courtesy Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Photography by Jaime Vedres

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new and recent work by Jeneen Frei Njootli, a Vuntut Gwitchin artist and one of five shortlisted for the 2018 Sobey Award. my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money speaks to refusals, belongings, loss and love, through a deeply personal body of work.

Frei Njootli’s interdisciplinary practice is often encountered through the traces of her interactions with materials, which are defined by her lived experience above the Arctic Circle. Deeply committed to the sovereignty of the Gwich’in people, Frei Njootli considers her culture’s belongings as they are entangled with ancestral memory, contemporary community and care. The works in the exhibition deal with the complex relationships of these belongings through the artist’s own impermanent body and the continued consumption of Indigenous people’s histories, labour and knowledge.

On first entering the gallery, visitors encounter four large-scale sheets of steel leaning against the walls and floor. Upon their surfaces we see impressions left by beadwork gifted to Frei Njootli by the women of her family. Pressed into the artist’s skin, their imprint is then transferred through grease onto the metal. Over time these prints gradually react and change, becoming more or less visible as the environmental conditions fluctuate within the gallery. Frei Njootli will activate one of the works on steel in a sound performance at the exhibition’s opening.

Also presented is a new video commissioned by CAG which continues this theme. A single take played forward and then in reverse as an endless loop, records the slow appearance of a panel of floral beadwork pressed onto Frei Njootli’s back. Projected at the same scale of the steel sheets, the artist’s skin becomes a vast and complex landscape. The impressions left by the beaded patterns disclose a deep pride in her community and the land that sustains it. Their fugitive nature reveals her desire to protect them both.   

Alongside the exhibition, the artist and curatorial team, in partnership with Simon Fraser University, have assembled a library of books spanning subjects from Gwich’in language and poetry to feminist theory. This new resource aims to offer numerous entry points into the work of Jeneen Frei Njootli and create a space for study, reflection and discussion.

The first monographic publication on Frei Njootli’s work accompanies this exhibition with commissioned texts by renowned Tsleil-Waututh writer Lee Maracle and emergent Cree poet and writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. A public launch will take place on Sunday, September 16, 2018 at 4.30pm.Presenting Sponsor: The Audain Foundation. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Audain Foundation, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, Nada Vuksic and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art towards the publication.