DEATH BOAT AND OTHER STORIES REFLECTS ON COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING AND INDIGENOUS CONCEPTS OF TRANSFORMATION

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Roger Aksadjuak, Death Boat, ceramic, 2008 (photo by Don Hall)

The MacKenzie Art Gallery is pleased to present Death Boat and Other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art, curated by Felicia Gay, on view from 18 July 2025 to 2 May 2027.

Death Boat and Other Stories shares diverse cultural and artistic interpretations of sites of transformation—physical, temporal, and spiritual. This exhibition features artworks drawn from the expansive Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art, which offers multifaceted worldviews situated in Indigenous knowledges and relationality.

The artists' work presents a varied landscape of transitional spaces, places, and temporal understandings that coalesce into a beautifully situated and embodied visual story.

Collectors Thomas Druyan and Alice Ladner began acquiring Indigenous art in 1992, amassing well over 1,000 works. The couple named the collection after Thomas Druyan’s parents, Wolf and Sala Kampelmacher. The collection illustrates a myriad of artistic expressions from across North America.

As MacKenzie Curator Felicia Gay researched the collection, she was strongly drawn to Inuk artist Roger Aksadjuak’s ceramic artwork Death Boat (2008). Gay understood Death Boat as an animate being; it spoke to her, in its own way, prompting the themes in the exhibition. At first glance, the death boat appears to represent a funerary practice, perhaps representing the transition from life to death or the continuation of life after death. As a vessel, it carries not only one person, but also a story. The spaces that humans, animals, and other sentient beings inhabit are temporal—never fixed. Gay asserts that to be Indigenous is to know profoundly what transformation is.

The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection is the largest donation of Indigenous and Inuit artworks that the MacKenzie Art Gallery has received to date. Death Boat and Other Stories is the second exhibition featuring works from the Kampelmacher Memorial Collection. The first exhibition, Across the Turtle’s Back, curated by Michelle LaVallee, was on view from 15 October 2016 to 30 April 2017. The collection continues to be an important resource for sharing Indigenous art practice with the public through Indigenous-centred curation.