Tania Willard: Balancing Act, Between an Outsider and an Insider

Haunting silhouettes of figures draped completely by blankets covered the glass on the Granville Street entrance to the Canada Line, part of the 2017 Capture Photography Festival. Each image depicted a figure covered under a sheet of appropriated Indigeneous designs. Paired as a diptych, one image portrayed a figure standing on barren land, while the other showcased a figure standing against a white backdrop. As one descended down the escalators onto the skytrain platform, one was left asking: who are these figures, and why are they covered?

This series, “#haunted_hunted,” 2014-2015, arose out of artist Tania Willard’s daily commute to Kamloops via the Trans-Canada Highway and the ongoing infrastructural upgrades driven largely by a demand to move more resources—in turn destroying the lands of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) First Nation. In each photograph, the viewer is left with a void in the shape of a human figure. Does this void represent the removal of Indigenous communities through colonization? The lack of Indigenous voices in the contemporary art world? A refusal to fit into stereotypical frameworks of Indigenous art? As the list goes on, its implications grow stronger. These powerful images, addressed through the juxtaposition of positive and negative space, draw attention to Indigenous spaces and their relation to art.

Operating in tandem with her project of BUSH Gallery, Willard explores how Indigenous contemporary artists are dislocated from their communities in order to participate in the art world. “I started to look at histories of the framing of Native Art as well as Canadian cultural policy to examine why there was so little resources or infrastructure for art on reservations. As I was (and am) living on my home reserve, I wanted to find ways to be in conversation about art with friends and those whose work I honour, but also to pick berries, to cut and air salmon, and be out on the land” Willard explains. Conceived in collaboration with Peter Morin and Gabrielle Hill, BUSH Gallery was a project of the collective the New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society Collective. Situated on her reserve near Chase, BC, “BUSH Gallery […] was a way to re-centre my experience of Secwepemc land, aesthetics and learning in a way that questioned why so much of my work as a self-employed creative professional was located in cities” Willard says. That is, BUSH Gallery acts as a way to address the exclusion of Indigenous people in the Canadian cultural landscape.

Running annual “rez-idency’s,” public art projects, and research as part of the gallery, Willard and Morin, along with UBCO professor and writer Ashok Mathur and curator Tarah Hogue, held a writer’s union over four days this summer. They performatively repurposed a tipi they had put up on the site in 2015 and re-used the fabric for a projection screen to view Daughter of Dawn, an early 1990s silent film with an all Native cast, now on Netflix. In addition they worked on a collective text that focused on performativity and began to look at mediums integral to the gallery, such as Willard’s photogram series “Sovereign Sun,” 2016, which involved the process of sun-printing. In 2015 Willard invited Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Joseph Naytowhow of the Kiy Collective to mount their performance, yahkaskwan mikiwahp (‘light’ pole tipi). In this performance, local community were invited to participate. Individuals were asked to hold handheld spot beams and sage smudge sticks in order to form a tipi through self-organization and timing with the interaction of light beams and smudge smoke in the air. Hosting regular gatherings such as yahkaskwan mikiwahp, Willard frequently involves the community in conversation surrounding how land-based ideas and systems inform their work, resulting in experimental works involving performance, photography, tattooed drum skins, sun prints, site intervention and video projections.

Willard uses forms of art within her practice that are largely derived from her community and the land. “Land Art I think is and was informed by Indigenous art practices and in the very least inspired by our lands. I think Indigenous people and artists have been working in this way for many many many years: a basket is land art when you focus in the ecological knowledge, acts of reciprocity, and deep land collaboration that weaving is. However we don’t really align with what Land Art has become in America. For example, Peter Morin visited Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and scrawled #BUSHgallery in the sand there – that is how we think about Land Art,” says Willard.. She is currently working on a series entitled “Anthro(a)apologizing,” where she is researching Secwepemc material culture, anthropometrics, and race theories that were extended to include Secwepemc people during the late 1800s. By examining museum practices in relation to Indigenous material, visiting and awakening ancestors there in those places, she aims to bring back to the community what is out there through photographing these documents. These photographs will then be transformed into cyanotypes developed by the sun shining on the land and bundled with medicine. The resulting works will resemble gestures, to quote Willard, “caught up in thought about these things.”

Since land informs much of Willard’s practice, she purposefully sits outside of the typical white cube gallery space. This allows her community engaged works to challenge the dominant Western narrative of art. “This gallery attempts to function outside of or rather at the margins of monetary systems, outdoors and away from the colonized space of art institutions” Willard says. However, this is not to say that Willard never exhibits within the art world, rather her work draws from this outside perspective and carves out a space where Aboriginal artists can create works that are influenced by customs, spirituality and languages while negating the notion of the ‘primitive’. Willard addresses these flaws in our political system by linking this “dislocation to a failure of national culture policies, the structural displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands and modernist ideas of the ‘primitive.” In a way, her work aims to uncover the hidden figures in “#haunted_hunted,” 2014-2015, by stripping away the proverbial blanket to allow for constructive dialogue on Indigenous representation within the arts. Willard goes on to say “the project is not a binary about dismantling gallery systems, it is about conceptualizing what Indigenous art systems might be or how we might shape new ways to revalue and relocate so that the economies of art and culture can be supported and benefit from the cultural economy in ways that are resonant with local community and wider conceptual and contemporary art.”

BUSH Gallery stands as a microcosm of how art systems can be altered to adapt to varying ideologies surrounding what is included in the Western canon of art. Willard does not refute the systems in place within the art world, but acknowledges how the ethnographic framing of Indigenous arts through the 1900s to 1950s contributed to cultural attitudes and policy in Canada that continue to echo through contemporary art systems today. By participating in the art world, through various exhibitions throughout Canada, Willard bears a voice for those who choose to live outside of the city centers. “It is really a project about valuing the land and so being active on it and giving back in the smallest way for all that we take. It is about refusing to accept that I have to move to the city and untether myself from my community where our language is strongest in order to participate in this art world stuff. I resist that and I am active about finding ways that I can be part of both and not feel left out” Willard explains. Through her interconnectivity between the land and her practice along with her resulting success, it is an example for other artists who sit on the peripheries that art does not have to originate from the center.

Inspired by the things around her in her curatorial, artistic, and personal practises, Willard dictates that art is derived from the everyday and the separation of ‘High Art’, as shown in galleries, should not dominate the dialogue on art. What is more interesting is what stands outside these walls—the trans-conceptual nature of BUSH Gallery or the artists that don’t fit in. Looking back at the history of art, it has always been these avant-garde practices that have broken down boundaries to create art that is relatable, visually stimulating, and impactful. Paving the way for change, Willard’s BUSH Gallery “started as an idea and provocation […] that through action can become closer and closer to imagining Indigenous run and conceptualized spaces of art.”

Helen Wong is a writer based in Vancouver. She has graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in Art History. She is the Interim Development Officer at the Contemporary Art Gallery and is interested in collaborative projects that link people to interactive and new ways of discovering art.