Opening Reception - These Hands: Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Tania Willard, Laura Huertas Millán, Flora M'mbugu-Schelling, Berwick Street Collective

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Chandra Melting Tallow, Tania Willard, “Coney Island Baby," 2017

production still, image courtesy of the artists

Opening: March 22 @ 7 - 9pm

Screening (Nightcleaners and These Hands): Wednesday April 4 @ 7pm & Saturday April 14 @ 2pm

Artist Talk with Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Laura Huertas Millán and others: Saturday May 5

Rabbit hunting in the snow. Weaving textiles on a backstrap loom. Smashing up rocks in a sun drenched quarry in Tanzania. Cleaning office buildings by night. These Hands is a group exhibition that presents four films organized around work—how it’s imagined, mythologized, and represented. Two of the films (Coney Island Baby and La Libertad) will be exhibited in the gallery, while the other two (Nightcleaners and These Hands) will be presented as auxiliary screenings in the Western Front's Grand Luxe Hall (on Wednesday April 4 and Saturday April 14). The artists in this exhibition look at women as labourers in societies where their labour is often invisible and undervalued. Here, the terms of employment are being challenged—by union organizing, collective working models, and questioning the terms of value. Ranging from ethnographic studies to structural experiments, the films in this exhibition critique and re-imagine the conditions in which these groups of women work together.

Films featured include:Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Tania Willard with cinematographers Amy Kazymerchyk and Aaron Leon came together at BUSH Gallery in 2016 to conceive the collaborative film project, Coney Island Baby which considers the complexities of labour that make up the trapping and raising of rabbits. The rabbit – a quick reproducing and unassuming nutrition source – is key in some Indigenous economies and food systems, and the labour to procure rabbits is often a role taken on by women. Coney Island Baby follows the actions of a group of Indigenous women as they learn and engage with this labour.

La Libertad by Colombian-French artist Laura Huertas Millán follows the work and lives of a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico. Working with backstrap looms, a pre-Hispanic technique long preserved by Indigenous women in Mesoamerica, La Libertad explores the weavers’ work as it ties to notions of freedom. The film’s formal structure echoes the techniques used by the women to create a woven image of independence, labour, and creativity. Circulating fragmented images between domestic space, an archeological museum, and a weaver’s cooperative, Huertas Millán articulates the tradition of handicraft, resistance, and the economical independence of women.

First released in 1975, Nightcleaners is a political documentary created by the Berwick Street Collective. The film depicts a group of underpaid female staff employed to clean office blocks during the night, and the campaign to improve their working conditions. The film entangles the lives of the workers, the women's movement, activists, filmmakers and the audience in a precarious and complex relationship that destabilized the film and its intent. Through collective filmmaking, experimental aesthetic strategies, social context, and political intent, Nightcleaners became recognized as a critical work of the 1970s, influencing the discussion of subject matter, form, political art, and who these films are for.These Hands by Tanzanian filmmaker Flora M’mbugu-Schelling documents a day in the lives of Mozambican women refugees working in a quarry outside Dar es Salaam in Tanzania as they crush rocks, care for children, sing songs, and dance. In These Hands, the camera is a witness that does not romanticize the women’s stories. Instead, the film enables viewers to consider their complicit identities as part of the global mechanism of social, economic and ideological production.

Artist Biographies:

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Metis artist and writer from Vancouver, BC, located on unceded Coast Salish territory. Gabrielle’s sculptures and installations perform as both a material exploration of color and form and an enquiry into concepts of land, property, and economy. Her work has been exhibited at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Sunset Terrace, and Gallery Gachet in Vancouver; SBC galerie d’art contemporain in Montreal; STRIDE gallery in Calgary; SOMArts in San Francisco; and Get This! Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwich’in artist and a founding member of the ReMatriate Collective. In her interdisciplinary practice she uses media such as performance, sound and textiles. Much of her work deconstructs the history of the materials she uses. She investigates their relationship to trade, ceremonial regalia, and the politics of First Nations art. Her work as a contemporary Indigenous artist has been recognized throughout Canada. In 2017, Njootli was longlisted as a nominee for the national Sobey Art Award and shortlisted for the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize. In 2016 she won the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists. She has completed multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta. For her recent Media Arts Residency at the Western Front, Vancouver, British Columbia, she hosted a free workshop teaching participants how to create and update Wikipedia pages for Indigenous women artists. In 2017, Jeneen Frei Njootli earned her MFA from University of British Columbia as an uninvited guest on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, Sto:lo and Tsleil-Waututh territories.

Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation) works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production, often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Willard has worked as a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard’s curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop, and Aboriginal Culture, a national touring exhibition first presented at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011. Alongside Karen Duffek, she co-curated Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology. As a practicing artist, Willard’s recent project BUSH gallery collapses the boundary between artist and curator while creating space for experimental contemporary art practice in a land-based, outdoor environment outside of institutional spaces. BUSH gallery hosts an annual rez-idency on Willard’s family land on Neskonlith Indian reserve, near Chase, BC, part of Secwepemculecw.

Chandra Melting Tallow is a musician/visual artist/film-maker and semi professional lipsyncer of mixed ancestry from the Siksika Nation. She works primarily in installation and performance. Her work has been exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria and Istanbul.

Laura Huertas Millán (1983, Bogotá, Colombia) is an artist and filmmaker living in Paris (France). Her films intertwining documentary and fiction circulate between contemporary art spaces and international cinema festivals, and have screened in venues such as the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Musée du Jeu de Paume, the Guggenheim Museum (NY), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Les Laboratoires d´Aubervilliers, Museo de Arte de Medellin (MAMM Colombia) and Instituto de Visión Gallery, among others. They have also been presented at the Toronto Film Festival (Wavelengths), the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Torino Film Festival, FICUNAM, Curtas Vila do Conde, Winterthur, La Habana and the Flaherty Seminar. Her work has been awarded prizes in events such as the FIDMarseille festival, Doclisboa, Videobrasil, the Fronteira Film Festival, Bogota´s Documentary Film Festival (MIDBO), at the Salon de Montrouge in France and Jeune Création Biennale. She holds a practice-based PhD. from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris and Ecole Nomale Superieure rue d´Ulm developed on “ethnographic fictions”; she was also a Sensory Ethnography Lab and a Harvard’s Film Study Center fellow between 2014 and 2017.

Flora M’mbugu-Schelling is a filmmaker from Tanzania. She attended the Tanzanian School of Journalism in Dar es Salaam, and also studied and trained in Germany and France. Her documentary films include Kumekucha (From Sun Up – 1987), which won a gold metal at the New York International Film Festival, and Shida and Matatizo (1993); These Hands (1992), deriving its title from a poem she wrote, has received many awards, including the Joris Ivers Award and the Perugia Prize in Italy.

The Berwick Street Film Collective was formed in 1970, and produced a series of feature documentaries until around 1980. The work of the collective was based on the film making, both individual and collaborative, of its small group of members – Richard Mordaunt, Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, and Humphry Trevelyan. Broadly speaking, these films were seen as being part of the avant garde of British documentary film in the 1970s.