The following is excerpted from a news release provided by the City of Vancouver.
The City of Vancouver Public Art Program is revealing 4 Platforms: Nine Places for Seeing tasks this month. The very first 2 to be provided are Coming Home To by Robin Roberts and Eagle Woman by Shain Niniwem Selapem Jackson.
Shain Niniwem Selapem Jackson’s Eagle Woman is a digital illustration of an eagle matriarch dancing below a complete copper moon. The work was motivated by the numerous ladies in the artist’s life who have actually raised him up and supplied assistance, love and assistance. The artist plans for audiences to feel these ladies’s capability to dance through misfortune and discomfort with relentless self-respect and nerve. In the artists own words:
In each period increases a matriarch. She lives her whole life to serve however she’s no servant. She’s a weaver. Attendant to a loom made from given parts. Its parts made generation after generation by marvelous ladies who bring a splendid vision, among love and unity. The hairs of her fabric are souls. Some have heart beats, others comprised just of memories entwined together with artistic desert.
Some hairs are copper and gold. Others are gorgeous with ends torn, scruffy, or torn. She’ll repair them with the fibers of her own frock regardless of being threadbare itself. Such is the sacrifice her art firmly insists.
This work is set up at the Olympic Village Station at Cambie and 2nd. It will remain in location till March 15, 2024.
Robin Roberts’ Coming Home To, revealing on the windows of the Canada Line King Edward Station till March 15, 2024, illustrates a pantheon of animals attracted northern Haida design Formline. The motivation for the bentwood box frontlet method originated from the artist sketching while listening to Aboriginal Studies teachers discuss the Indian Act, the development of reserves and domestic schools. He discovered himself constantly drawing boxes that are representative of efforts to restrict, or box in Indigeneity.
The work was produced in 3 areas with the left and ideal windows portraying a bentwood box frontlet figure and a killer whale, representing the water world. Positioning the bentwood box figures on the external panels was done so that the images are included within that box. The center window illustrate from delegated right, an eagle with a human figure (sky and earth worlds), a Bear Mother story (earth world), and a raven taking the sun, with a salmon egg as the sun (sky and water worlds).
This work exists on clear vinyl, in part to recommend stained glass windows and the history of religious beliefs associated to both the artists household and the church’s function in the procedure of colonization.
Three of Robins’ grandparents went to domestic school, with the 4th participating in day-school. Due to Canadian efforts at erasure, there is a principle in the artist’s country of returning house.
This work remains in honour of that return. Robin strengthens that story with the representation of the salmon, who is understood for its difficult return journey, in addition to the Haida story of the mom bear which is itself, a story of change and returning house.
