Rolande Souliere: Frequent Stopping IV and V
to
Contemporary Art Gallery 555 Nelson Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 6R5
Rolande Souliere, "Untitled," 2019
courtesy the artist
Rolande Souliere | Walking Tour
Sunday, April 7, 3pm
Off-site at Inform Interiors, 50 Water Street, VancouverIn this sidewalk tour linking CAG, Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and the artist’s wrapped How far do you travel? bus, Rolande Souliere speaks about the three inter-related projects comprising her solo exhibition and her contribution to the public art initiative, How far do you travel?
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents two new large-scale, site specific works by Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere, presented across the street level façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery and off-site at the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station.
Souliere has a long history of working with the materials and metaphors of the road. Often using compositional strategies of repetition, she incorporates materials such as automobile tail-lights and headlamps, GPS systems and reflective roadside signage. Stripped from their usual contexts and redeployed as artistic installations, these symbols are uncoupled from their role as wayfinding aids and instead suggest the extent to which regulatory bodies dictate our movements on the land, and the role of the automobile in the hungry expansionism of North American colonial infrastructure.
Her solo exhibition Frequent Stopping IV and V draws from her ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive, muscular installations, entangling the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. In her Frequent Stopping series, Souliere’s use of red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape—commonly used to flag roadside construction, potential hazards or obstacles in our urban environments—has a very particular point of origin: the long legal battle fought by her own Michipicoten First Nation to settle their land claim. In Frequent Stopping IV and V, Souliere materially and metaphorically renders these events ultra-visible, as highly public notifications of the many outstanding debts to Indigenous communities and the many territories—including those of the Salish Nations upon which Vancouver sits—never ceded to the state. Rather than suspending caution tape temporarily between two points in space as we normally encounter it, the artist fixes it directly to walls and windows, marking space in a gesture that speaks of permanent visibility and reclamation, delineating lines that cannot be drawn and redrawn.
At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station work is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program, InTransit BC.
Bio
Rolande Souliere is a member of the Michipicoten First Nation, born in Toronto, Canada, and currently living in Sydney, Australia. In 2017 she received a PhD from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. A selection of Souliere’s international solo exhibitions include Form and Content, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe (2018); Coyote Responds: I Like America and America Likes Me, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Sydney Non Objective (2015); CrossRoads, Urban Shaman, Winnipeg (2011) and Materiality and Otherness, grunt gallery, Vancouver (2008). Recent group exhibitions include niigaanikwewag, Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); Language as Puncture, Gallery 101, Ottawa (2017); the cross-Canada touring exhibition Beat Nation (2012-2014); the Australia-wide touring exhibition Alterbeast (2014); Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto (2010) and Point of Origin at Artspace, Sydney (2008). Her public art commissions include Bringing Back Wabakinine (2015) in the Bala Underpass, Toronto, and the recently completed Mediating the Treaties (2017-18) at Air Canada Park in Winnipeg, commissioned by the Winnipeg Art Council.