Grand Luxe Hall @ 7pm

A conversation and screening with Krista Belle Stewart viewing elements of her new video works, created during recent production residencies at the Western Front. This talk is presented in conjunction with the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Nisga’a Museum. Dory Nason, UBC First Nations Assistant Professor will respond to Stewart’s new works. Nason’s areas of research include contemporary Indigenous Feminisms and related Native women’s intellectual history and literature. She is currently at work on her book manuscript, Red Feminist Voices: Native Women’s Activist Literature. She was also a featured contributor to the groundbreaking anthology, The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement (ARP Books), which was released to great acclaim in March 2014.

BIO
Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, living and working in Vancouver and Brooklyn. Group exhibitions include Fiction/Non-fiction at The Esker Foundation, Calgary (2013) and Music from the New Wilderness, Western Front, Vancouver (2014). At Western Front, Stewart produced a collaborative multimedia performance working with, circa 1918, wax-cylinder recordings by anthropologist James Alexander Teit of her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko. A string quartet responded live to Stewart’s loops of these traditional Okanagan songs presented alongside visual projections. Most recently, Stewart was commissioned by the City of Vancouver as part of the “Year of Reconciliation,” Public Art Project at the entrance to the Canada Line City Centre Station at Granville and Georgia where Stewart’s Her Story (2014), a public photo mural and video installation, utilized footage of a 1967 CBC documentary entitled Seraphine: Her Own Story, a scripted interpretation of her mother’s journey from residential school to becoming BC’s first Aboriginal public health nurse. This work was also exhibited in Where Does it Hurt? at Artspeak (2014). Stewart juxtaposes the 1967 film, in which her mother plays herself, alongside a video of her mother’s 2013 Truth and Reconciliation Commission interview, generating a conversation between depiction and lived experience.

This project is made possible with the generous support of the Western Front Media Arts Residency, the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, British Columbia Arts Council, and the Nisga’a Nation through the Nisga’a Lisims Government.