Tania Willard: Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire

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Tania Willard, "Affirmations for Wildflowers (study)," 2020

digital image and laser etching on glass

WORKSHOP / Site/ations

Facilitated by Tania Willard

WED, OCT 14 / 5:30PM PDT Presented on Zoom

This workshop is free but space is limited. Please contact audaingallery@sfu.ca to register.

Activated in Tania Willard’s exhibition Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire  and woven throughout her practice are concerns for the intersections of art making, land, Indigenous art histories and interventions into colonial logics. In this workshop, the artist will expand upon her idea of Site/ation, which is a concerted practice of giving voice to the knowledge contained in the land. In this collective exercise, participants will be invited to author and share their own Site/ation, taking account of their presence (their identity), place (where they are / from / going) and practices (the ways they make their life) in relation to Indigenous land, history and ideas of collective futurity.

Participants are encouraged to read the BUSH gallery manifesto, which is co-authored by Willard, ahead of the workshop, which is available here. 

Tania Willard’s artistic practice engages cultural knowledges to cultivate works that range from land-based Indigenous contemporary art to survival strategies for contemporary socio-political upheavals. Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire is a street-facing window exhibition that uses light projection, reflection, representations of flora, and personal and political affirmations to evoke relations of sustenance in uncertain but flourishing times.

In this series of works, the idea of affirming and validating transformational worth, justice and futurity are conceptually plaited together with fragmented ethnobotanical knowledge and colour therapy qualities. Braiding between the specificity of the gallery’s downtown eastside location and the artist's home territory of Secwepemcúl̓ecw, Affirmations for Wildflowers: An Ethnobotany of Desire uses light and reflection to project both inward and outward emotional resonances. The works reflect a desire for transformational change and echo different qualities of wildflowers, current socio-political climates, longstanding Indigenous rights movements, and the power of seasonal changes on the land.

This year, 2020, the wildflowers that bloom in late spring and early summer were prolific in Secwepemcúl̓ecw, while simultaneously a global pandemic, and both Black Lives Matter and Indigenous protests, were destabilizing entrenched orders. While these political transformations continue, Willard’s project invests in the blooming of resistance within an equilibrium of health and relationality to lands. These works seek to reflect the political complexity of this time while also projecting an affirmation of seasonal cycles of blooming wildflowers as a mirror for a transforming world.

Tania Willard, Secwépemc Nation and settler heritage, works with shifting ideas around what is considered contemporary and traditional, often invoking bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in the intersections between Secwepémc knowledges and other cultures. As an artist, Willard’s work has been shown widely across Canada, including solo exhibitions with Kamloops Art Gallery (2009) and Burnaby Art Gallery (2017). Willard's ongoing collaborative project, BUSH gallery, is a conceptual land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges. Willard is an Assistant Professor at UBC Okanagan in Syilx territories, and her current research intersects with land-based art practices.

Curated by cheyanne turions

Event

Workshop: Site / ations with Tania Willard

Wednesday, October 14, 5:30pm PDT

Presented on Zoom. Please email audaingallery@sfu.ca for details.