Manuel Axel Strain | what do you know?
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery 1825 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2
Manuel Axel Strain, "what do you know?," 2023
Courtesy of the Gallery.
Manuel Axel Strain with Tracey Eustache/Strain, Cam Strain, Quintasket Strain, Segwses Strain, Harold Eustache, Neil Eustache, Soloman Chiniquay and Ryan Clough-Carroll.
Manuel Axel Strain’s work prioritizes embodied knowledge. Strain’s work across painting, installation, video and performance is grounded by the interconnectedness of land and water in relation to family, kin and ancestors. The collaboration with relatives and their shared experiences with Indigeneity, labour, resource extraction, gender and medicine are sources of agency that resonate through the work.
Commissioned for the Belkin’s outdoor screen, what do you know? comprises three segments that layer voices and locations across space and time. As part of the installation, the video is surrounded by an in situ painting that evokes a power that is traced to different memories, stories and places. This painting becomes a portal into and beyond the moving image. Strain’s mother, brother, niece and nephew figure in the video, sharing two poems that are in dialogue with one another. The first poem was written by Strain’s grandfather to honour his mother at her funeral. It reflects on life before colonization and situates Strain’s great-grandmother as one who had lived in good relation with the land and her ancestors: “They believed we belonged to the land and the land belonged to us but in death.”
Filmed in proximity to the Fraser River, near where the artist lives, what do you know? begins with the voice of Strain’s mother reciting her father’s poem as the low angle, hand-held camera follows her along a snowy path into the forest. The location shifts to the foreshore of the Burrard Inlet with its beaches, cranes and marine industry where resources come onto, as well as off of, the land. In the low winter light the family circles, turning inward toward each other in a moment in which the legacy of colonialism and extraction is palpable. Words are absent, only the gestures speak. In the third segment Strain’s brother, nephew and niece occupy a space between foreground and background, their faces separated and framed by Coast Salish eye cut-outs. Their voices come together and break apart in their individual recitations of a second poem written by Neil Eustache, Strain’s uncle. The words come in and out of sync, not unlike how knowledge is absorbed and understood: “There are things they don’t want you to know, there are things that you didn’t know, and there are things you will know.” what do you know? reveals the connection between kinship, land, labour, extraction and where knowledge is held.