Truth to Material
Krista Bell Stewart
September 20 to November 10, 2019
@
Nanaimo Art Gallery
150 Commercial Street
Nanaimo, British Columbia
By Garrett Lockhart
Are we going to walk on this?
With laminated vinyl covering the entire floor before us, my grandmother asks me this question. Like entering someone’s home with your dirty city shoes on, we first step carefully, on the balls of our feet, around blown-up images: a Smurf in a headdress, clusters of teepees on rolling hills, white people with brown faces. Inside, two objects sit under glass vitrines: an etched silver arm band and a deer-hide dress adorned with glass beads, shells, and acrylic paint. Faint chanting is heard through a door with a soft red-tinted window, leading to a small projection room. Back on the floor, more images of fields, a Volkswagen Passat, an Indian carved out of wood (a backyard ornament), and a stone wall with the name Karl May etched in. May, born in 1842, remains one of the most popular writers in Germany, famed for fictional accounts of First Nations groups in North America.
For her exhibition Truth To Material at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, Krista Belle Stewart put herself inside an “Indianer” gathering in rural Germany, an event largely inspired by May’s fables, and depictions of Native Americans in propaganda circulated by the Nazis. As a member of the Syilx Nation, Stewart enters as a covert anthropologist, exposing a form of appropriation at it’s purest.
In the projection room, my grandmother and I watch rain on a windshield for a few minutes before a camp of teepees finally pulls into focus. It’s a nightmarish LARP. Inside the teepee, meat cooks over an open fire, animal hides lie on the floor. White participants wearing loincloths are interviewed while they smoke cigarettes: Stewart listens patiently as they explain their compulsion to dress up, between puffs, first in German, then translated in English. In brownface —sometimes brownbody— they dance for her. I think of a recently circulated photograph of our prime minister in brownface.
Back in the gallery, we notice the scuffs on the floor from previous visitors. This time we do not hesitate to walk over the images: Wrangler jeans, a miniature confederate flag hung above a desktop computer. It’s all a sort of simulated Americana. The objects behind glass are gifts from the gathering—the cuff and the dress are props.
I am a second-generation German settler on the land of the Snuneymuxw peoples. My relatives grew up with May’s stories. I wonder how this land was rendered to my great grandmother and great grandfather as they fled the Nazis. I think of the tens of thousands of German tourists that fly to this place every year, how many step too close to the edge of the rocks and are swept away into the ocean. Later that day I go out into the forest, a few towns north. As a guest, I adjust my pace once more, and I tread lightly. My grandmother’s question echoes.
-
Krista Belle Stewart is an artist and member of the Syilx Nation (Okanagan) currently based in Berlin. Stweart works with video, photography, land, performance, textiles, and sound, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. Her works have recently been shown at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Gallery 44, Toronto; Artspace, Peterborough; SFU Teck Gallery, Vancouver; Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal; Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; Independent Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Stewart holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, New York. She recently completed a six month residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin awarded by the Sobey Art Foundation and is the 2019 recipient of the VIVA Award funded through the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Garrett Lockhart (b. 1994, Nanaimo, B.C., Canada) is an artist, curator, and occasional writer living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has an upcoming exhibition with Maria Nollos Mateos at Tilde, Amsterdam. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Mudflat Pavilion at PS311, Ottawa; Planet of Weeds at Crutch CAC, Toronto; envoi at Sibling, Toronto; and Bending Towards the Sun at YYZ Artists' Outlet, Toronto. He is a co-director of Calaboose, an independent project space with no fixed address. Recent curatorial projects include Red Sky at Morning at Interstate Projects, NYC; After the rain, Montreal; and Bruno Sport Bar Biennale, Montreal.
Images by Sean Fenzl, courtesy of the Nanaimo Art Gallery.
