Wapatah partners with Postcommodity and Remai Modern on “Time Holds All the Answers” Exhibition.

Wapatah partners with Postcommodity and Remai Modern on “Time Holds All the Answers” Exhibition.

Curated by Dr. Gerald McMaster and hosted by Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Time Holds All the Answers is Postcommodity’s most significant museum exhibition to date. In addition to two of Remai Modern’s largest gallery spaces, works will be featured throughout the building. With a selection of new pieces created for the occasion, the exhibition includes architecturally-scaled sculpture and immersive multimedia installations that incorporate sound and text. The exhibition touches on subjects including resource extraction and land use, toxicity and containment, intersections of the global market with human elders, translation across Indigenous and colonial languages, and the mythologies of modern art and architecture.

Postcommodity deploy a creative methodology of hacking, intentionally breaking predetermined products or structures in order to modify their original use and inspire alternative outcomes. In practice, hacking undoes, reimagines and resets. How can this be accomplished? Using art as a wedge, Postcommodity inject Indigenous Knowledge Systems into the museum space to expand common points of reference. In their work, the artists transform the museum into a site where their concept of re-imagined ceremony takes shape. While ceremony is generally associated with a religious or spiritual gathering that celebrates a particular event, Postcommodity’s approach creates an immersive narrative environment throughout the museum, welcoming visitors into a realm of symbolic exchange that enacts respect, responsibility and reciprocity.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective, currently comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. They create works of art that personify a shared Indigenous lens and voice, examining aspects of 21st-century life to inspire a uniquely Indigenous futurism. Using provocation as a tool, they spark constructive conversations that challenge the social, political and economic processes that destabilize communities and geographies.

Artists and Curatorial Team

Cristóbal Martínez is a Mestizo artist, scholar and Chair of the Art and Technology Program at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2003 he co-founded the artist-hacker performance ensemble Radio Healer, and in 2009 he began working as a member of Postcommodity. In 2018 he co-created, with post-Mexican composer Guillermo Galindo, the experimental electronic music duet Red Culebra. Martínez has dedicated his life and career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art.

Kade L. Twist is a member of the Cherokee Nation and grew up in Bakersfield, California, home to one of the largest Cherokee communities in the U.S. Twist is a co-founding member of Postcommodity, and a professor in Art + Social Practice at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles. In addition to his art practice, Twist works as a public affairs consultant specializing in American Indian health care, technology and community development.

Gerald McMaster is a leading voice nationally and internationally, with over 30 years of experience in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and Indigenous aesthetics. He is Plains Cree from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation and a member of the Siksika Nation. He served as the Canadian Commissioner for the 1995 Venice Biennale, Artistic Director of the 2012 Biennale of Sydney; and Curator for the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. McMaster has served as Adjunct Curator for Remai Modern since 2018. He is a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair and Director of Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University in Toronto.

Wapatah Team Contributors

Dr. Gerald McMaster

Position: Director, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair
Email: gmcmaster@faculty.ocadu.ca

Dr. McMaster has over 30 years international work and expertise in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and Indigenous aesthetics. His experience as an artist and curator in art and ethnology museums researching and collecting art, as well as producing exhibitions has given him a thorough understanding of transnational Indigenous visual culture and curatorial practice. His early interests concerned the ways in which culturally sensitive objects were displayed in ethnology museums, as well as the lack of representation of Indigenous artists in art museums.

As a practicing artist, he offered a way of staging hitherto decontextualized objects different from the traditional formats favoured by exhibition designers trained in Western traditions; instead, his was an approach that rested on Indigenous epistemologies. These early stages in developing an –Indigenous visuality led him to study concepts in visual, experiential and spatial composition. His exhibition Savage Graces (1992) challenged long held views, and played a major role in breaking down conventional barriers around where art should be practiced, while also demonstrating that art is not tied to ethnicity.

As a curator, he focused on advancing the intellectual landscape for Indigenous curatorship through the foundational concept of voice. He curated, for example, an exhibition called Indigena (1992) that brought together unfiltered Indigenous voices for the first time. Until then, non-Indigenous scholars had dominated discussions of Indigenous art, history and culture. McMaster made the point that Indigenous artists and writers were more than capable of representing themselves in articulate, eloquent ways.

Over the past 20 years, he has continued to refine the idea of voice, leading him to ask: How can Indigenous voices continue providing new perspectives on well-researched subjects such as art, history and anthropology? Throughout his career, his championing of the mainstream value of Indigenous art, among other things, has led to his being chosen to represent Canada at a number of prestigious international events. These include his serving as Canadian Commissioner for the 1995 Venice Biennale, and as artistic director of the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, and curator for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. 

Dr. Gerald McMaster

Director, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair

Dr. McMaster has over 30 years international work and expertise...

Dr. Michael Rattray

Position: Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Rattray is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wapatah under the supervision of Dr. McMaster. Before joining the centre, he was the executive editor and associate publisher at the Art Canada Institute, and the senior editor at Adbusters Magazine. He completed his PhD at Concordia University in Montreal, under the direction of Dr. Johanne Sloan. His PhD dissertation, “Functional Anarchism(s) and the Theory of Global Contemporary Art,” evaluates globalized art within an anarchist philosophical trajectory. An exhibiting artist, curator, and critic, his work on contemporary art and art history has been published or exhibited in a variety of forms. 

Dr. Michael Rattray

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Rattray is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wapatah under the...

Natalja Chestopalova

Position: Research Project Manager

Natalja Chestopalova is part of the Ph.D. in Communication and Culture Program at York and Ryerson Universities in Toronto. Her research is informed by the study of digital media, archival aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, and focuses on the transformative sensory experience and multimodality in film, graphic novel medium, and theatrical site-specific performances. With the support from the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC), she has presented at multiple Canadian and International events, including roundtables & panels on new media archives, visual storytelling, and preservation of ephemeral cultural narratives. Her recent works include papers and multimodal installations on archives-of-trauma in non-fiction graphic narratives and theoretical developments in the Lacanian concept of the voice and voicelessness. Her publications appear in the White Wall Review, Canadian Journal of Communication, Dialogue, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction, and an essay volume on the Freudian theory of afterwardness and archives-of-feeling in comics of Alison Bechdel.
Currently Natalja is working as a researcher at the Ontario College of Art and Design University with Gerald McMaster. As part of the Indigenous Visual Culture Research Centre she is contributing to projects that actively support Indigenous talent, and promote meaningful research exchange, and contribute to the creation of living digital archives that can mobilize and centralize Indigenous knowledge.

Natalja Chestopalova

Research Project Manager

Natalja Chestopalova is part of the Ph.D. in Communication and...

Brittany Bergin

Position: Research Assistant

Brittany Pitseolak Bergin is a research assistant at Wapatah Centre, OCAD University. Raised in Southern Ontario, her family is from Kinngait, Cape Dorset. Inspired by the artists in her family and community, including her great-grandmother and namesake Pitseolak Ashoona, Brittany’s focus at Wapatah is centred in community engagement as she continues to support major projects and outreach initiatives. Her work has been integral to the success of projects such as the Virtual Platform for Indigenous Art, Arctic/Amazon Symposium, Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity exhibition and publication, and Indigenizing the (Art) Museum Virtual Series. Her most recent conferences include the Frontend Conference (Munich) and Inuit Studies Conference (Montreal). 

Brittany Bergin

Research Assistant

Brittany Pitseolak Bergin is a research assistant at Wapatah Centre,...

Mariah Meawasige

Position: Research Assistant

Mariah (Makoose) 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.

Mariah Meawasige

Research Assistant

Mariah (Makoose) is an Anishinaabe/settler and creative from the northern...

Panya Clark Espinal

Position: Alumni

Panya, AOCA (1988), MFA (2019), is a multi-media installation artist who recently completed a Masters Degree in Criticism and Curatorial Practice (CCP) at OCADU. Her practice as an artist investigates the mechanisms of cultural representation and, through site-specific installations, exhibitions and public commissions, explores questions of perception, reproduction, collection, and display. Her CCP thesis titled Between Stories: The Agency of Story and Living Ways was developed while working alongside Elín Agla, a Vernacular Culture Farmer from Árneshreppur County, Iceland. At Wapatah, Panya has contributed to writing the Bill Reid book for the Art Canada Institute, is acting as a research assistant on The Entangled Gaze project and in involved in planning a publication for the Postcommodity Collective.

Panya Clark Espinal

Alumni

Panya, AOCA (1988), MFA (2019), is a multi-media installation artist...

Alessia Rose Pignotti

Position: Alumni

Alessia is a conceptual, multimedia artist and graphic designer whose most recent artistic practice explores the notion of the creative instinct. She holds a Masters of Art (2019) from OCAD University in the Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories program, and received an Honours Bachelor of Arts (2017) from the University of Toronto in a joint program with Sheridan College. At Wapatah, Alessia is a Research Assistant supporting Dr. Gerald McMaster’s Bill Reid publication project for the Art Canada Institute.

Alessia Rose Pignotti

Alumni

Alessia is a conceptual, multimedia artist and graphic designer whose most...

Time Holds All the Answers is coordinated at Remai Modern by: 

Rose Bouthillier, Curator (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern

Donald Roach, Exhibitions Manager at Remai Modern

Emily Dunseith, Registrar (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern

Troy Mamer, Programs Assistant (Curatorial) at Remai Modern

Jason Hosaluk, Preparator at Remai Modern

Chad Redl, Preparator at Remai Modern

Darren McQuay, Preparator at Remai Modern

Cameron McKay, Preparator at Remai Modern

Paul Atkins, Preparator at Remai Modern

Ian Rawlison, Preparator at Remai Modern

Image Caption: Postcommodity, Let Us Pray For the Water Between Us, 2020, 2,200-gallon polyethylene hazmat chemical storage container, brushless linear motor, leather mallet, wood, steel, aircraft cable, algorithmic composition. Originally commissioned by Minneapolis Institute of Art. Installation view, Time Holds All the Answers, Remai Modern, 2021. Photo: Carey Shaw.

       
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