Fotoeins Fotografie

Fotoeins Friday at Vancouver AG: T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss

By HL fotoeins on 17 Jan 2020

Above/featured: K’axwch’k Nexw7y’ay’ulh (Turtle Journeys), from the Sacred Teachings series, 2018.

T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss: Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Métis, Kanaka Maoli, Irish, Swiss.

The snap above is from a video which shows the artist’s Hawaiian cultural and spiritual mentor, Happy Kahuna Pahia. In the light of dusk at Papa’iloa Beach on the leeward side of O’ahu in Hawaii, we see her lying beside a ‘honu’, a green sea turtle, who’s come to rest on shore and harden her shell after travelling great distances in the ocean.

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“Transits and Returns” presents the work of 21 Indigenous artists whose practices are both rooted in the specificities of their cultures and routed via their travels. These forces of situatedness and mobility work in synergy and in tension with one another, shaping the multiple ways of understanding and being Indigenous today. Within the exhibition, these dual realities are explored through themes of movement, territory, kinship and representation, with many artworks inhabiting multiple categories. The resulting presentation foregrounds the creative sovereignty of each artist to determine their own articulations of the world, while also exploring the resonances between them.

Featuring artists from local First Nations, as well as those from communities located throughout the Pacific region (ranging from Alutiiq territory in the north to Māori lands in the south, with many mainland and island Nations in between), Transits and Returns traces wide-ranging experiences that are inclusive of both ancestral knowledges and global connections.

The descriptions are directly from the Vancouver Art Gallery where T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss’ video installation is on exhibition until 23 February 2020. With her work as artist and ethnobotanist, she was named by the Vancouver Public Library as Indigenous Storyteller in Residence for 2018.

I made the photo above on 15 Oct 2019 with a Fujifilm X70. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-g51.