Virtual Roundtable Series Indigenizing the Museum: Meaningmaking through AR / VR July 23rd, 2020

 

“we don’t speak from a position of fear, but from a position of power when we are engaging emergent media” 

(Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist)

 

On July 23rd, 2020, Wapatah: Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge hosted its third Virtual Roundtable as part of the Virtual Platform for Indigenous Art (VPIA) project and its latest Indigenizing the Museum event series. 

 

Moderated by Gerald McMaster, this Roundtable brought together Jason Baerg, Kade L. Twist, Cristóbal Martínez, and Mariah Meawasige to address themes of Intention and Meaningmaking when representing and reconstructing Indigenous art through technology like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). The discussion focused on the ethical considerations when interacting with Indigenous artwork online and entering and exiting digital spaces such as AR/VR.


The VPIA is a custom digital platform currently in development by Wapatah at OCAD University, designed to facilitate Indigenous access and contributions to Indigenous artworks in museum and gallery collections around the world. Using a wiki-style approach, the VPIA allows institutional artwork records to be transformed into living documents that integrate Indigenous knowledge, language, and protocols. 

The Roundtable Series, Indigenizing the Museum, has been developed as a way to increase Indigenous community and institutional awareness of and involvement in the VPIA as a resource and a knowledge building tool.

 

Our Guest Panelists

Kade L. Twist and Cristobal Martinez – Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano) and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee). Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial, and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promotes a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connects Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.

For more information: www.postcommodity.com

 

Jason Baerg is a Métis curator, educator, and visual artist. Dedicated to community development, he founded and incorporated the Métis Artist Collective and has served as volunteer Chair for such organizations as the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition. Creatively as a visual artist, he pushes new boundaries in digital interventions in drawing, painting, and new media installation. His recent international solo exhibitions include the Illuminato Festival in Toronto, Canada, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and the Digital Dome at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

For more information: www.jasonbaerg.info

 

Mariah (Makoose) Meawasige is an Anishinaabe/settler and creative from the northern shores of Lake Huron. Her practice specializes in graphic design but questions the bounds of communication through illustration, sculpture, video, and performance. She created the logo for the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge and is currently working on the centre’s visual identity. Through her love of stories and storytelling, Mariah’s body of work aims to explore temporalities and place, map memories, and build relationships.

For more information: www.makoose.com

 

Wapatah Team

Dr. Gerald McMaster

Dr. Michael Rattray

Natalja Chestopalova

Brittany Bergin

Mariah Meawasige

Rezvan Boostani

Yiyi Shao

Maya Filipp

Panya Espinal Clark

Alessia Pignotti

Jananda Lima

 

   

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