For This Land: Inside Elemental

Onsite Gallery at OCAD University’s stunning new location at 199 Richmond St. W. includes a Category A designed exhibition space and media lounge as well as collection storage, study and exhibition zones. We are excited to inaugurate this 8,000 square-foot build with the following major exhibitions:
 

For This Land: Inside Elemental 
2Ro Media: Jackson 2bears and Janet Rogers
Presented with community partner imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival

For this Land: Inside Elemental is part of a multi-project series by 2Ro Media,  comprised of Jackson 2bears and Janet Rogers—both Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) artists from Six Nations of the Grand River. The artists, who currently live outside their traditional territory, produce work collaboratively about ‘returning home’, which typically involves creating site-specific narratives using video, sound, poetry, performance and multi-media installation.

With Inside Elemental, the artists engage in a series of conversations with the Kana:ta Village on traditional Haudenosaunee territory in order to create an immersive multimedia installation using sound, video, performance and digital languages. Inside Elemental is an exploration of the internalization of one’s traditional territory, and in general about how external environments are deeply intertwined with identity, self-understanding, and the interiority of personal and collective experience. The exhibition brochure is available online here.

Jackson 2bears is a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) multimedia installation/performance artist and cultural theorist originally from Six Nations of the Grand River. He is currently based in Lethbridge, Alberta. Since 1999, 2bears has exhibited his work extensively across Canada in public galleries, museums and artist-run centres, as well as internationally, in festivals and in group exhibitions.

Janet Rogers is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has lived in Stoney Creek, Hamilton and Toronto, Ontario. She has been living as a guest on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people in Victoria, British Columbia, since 1994. Janet works in the genres of poetry, spoken word performance poetry, video poetry and recorded poetry with music. Janet is also a radio broadcaster, a documentary producer, and a media and sound artist.

imagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival
imagineNATIVE is the international centre for Indigenous-made media arts. Through year-round presentation, promotion and professional development activities, it is committed to a greater understanding by audiences of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and artistic expressions.

Public Events

• Saturday, September 23, 4 p.m.: Canadian Art Magazine’s Gallery Day with talk by Lindsay Nixon
• Saturday, September 30, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.: Nuit Blanche at Onsite Gallery
• Tuesday, October 10, 7 p.m.: Lisa Myers Artist Talk
• Friday, October 20, 5 p.m.: imagineNATIVE Art Crawl Kick-Off
• Saturday, November 4, 2 p.m.: Mark Igloliorte Artist Talk
• Thursday, November 16, 12 to 4 p.m.: Wiki-Edit-a-Thon with the Inuit Artist Database
• Thursday, November 16, 6 p.m.: Panel Talk: Indigenous Tattoo Revitalization with Native Women in the Arts
• Saturday, December 2, 2 p.m.: Land Claims: raise a flag Pennant Workshop and Artist Presentation
• Sunday, December 3, 2 p.m.: Indigenous Art Today: Lindsay Nixon & Ryan Rice

Supporters

Onsite Gallery gratefully acknowledges that the new gallery construction project is funded in part by the Government of Canada's Canada Cultural Spaces Fund at Canadian Heritage, the City of Toronto through a Section 37 agreement and Aspen Ridge Homes.