Place-based Practices
- Jaime Adams
- Paula Booker
- Irwin Oostindie
- Senaqwila Wyss
- Siku Allooloo
Join us at Maplewood Mudflats for an afternoon exploring place-based practices, including a conversation with artists Siku Allooloo and Jaime Adams, and curator Paula Booker, about their work in our current exhibition Storytelling and Stewardship, and a guided tour of the conservation area by Irwin Oostindie and Senaqwila Wyss of Wild Bird Trust of BC.
Jaime Adams will present a selection of works from her photographic series, The Ecological Influence of Allelopathy (2021-ongoing), which documents Maplewood Flats. Using invasive plant species removed from the site, Adams extracts plant based developers to process her black and white films and soups her colour negatives in sea and fresh water collected from the area. Heavy metals in the water interact with the film emulsion, further relating the site to her practice.
Siku Allooloo will screen and talk about her experimental documentary, Spirit Emulsion (2022), which was filmed on Super 8 and developed with plant medicines and botanical collected in Denendeh, Northwest Territories, where she was raised, and the Coast Salish territories where the film was shot. Through this, Allooloo evokes her culture and the legacy of her late mother by connecting earth to cosmos. She will also introduce the feature length documentary that she will develop in residence at Western Front, for which Spirit Emulsion serves as an opening prayer.
The artists will then be joined by Paula Booker for a short conversation and Q&A. To conclude the day, all are welcome to join Irwin Oostindie and Senaqwila Wyss of Wild Bird Trust of BC for a guided tour of Maplewood Flats.
Transportation from Western Front is available via minibus and will depart at 1:30 p.m, returning at approximately 5:00 p.m. If you would like to make use of this shuttle service, please select this option when registering.
Facilitated by Nathaniel Marchand.
About the Speakers
Jaime Adams is fostering an emergent photographic land-based art practice. A settler originally from Cranbrook, BC, she now lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She was the founder of Forest and the Femme Society, a non-profit outdoor program connecting marginalized women living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver with nature. After sustaining a brain injury, Adams became a volunteer at Maplewood Flats in Tsleil-Waututh territory, doing habitat restoration. Here she discovered ways to understand and navigate her own recovery through land-based analogue photography, using plants and waters from the areas to develop and alter her work.
Siku Allooloo is an Inuk/Haitian/Taíno filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, poet, and community builder. She comes from Denendeh, Northwest Territories, by way of Haïti through her mother and Mittimatalik, Nunavut, through her father. Allooloo often reimagines conventional forms as imbued by her cultural traditions, oral history, and land-based practice. She resides in the unceded homeland of K’ómoks First Nation.
Paula Booker is a settler writer, curator, and life-long gardener. Raised on a farm outside Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and trained as a visual artist, she has held senior leadership, curatorial, editorial, programming, and outreach roles in diverse arts and heritage organizations from documenta, Kassel, to the Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (New Zealand Film Archive) and the Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. Since 2016, as an immigrant and guest on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ Territories, Paula has explored art work and curatorial methods that uphold Indigenous sovereignty and relationships to place. Paula lives and works in East Vancouver in the place called X̱epx̱ápay̓ay [in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim], right on the edge of the Salish Sea (Burrard Inlet).
Irwin Oostindie is a Dutch settler working for redress in public arts and land-use policy. He is President of the Wild Bird Trust of BC responsible for caretaking Maplewood Flats on Tsleil-Waututh Nation lands. He holds an MA in Communications from Simon Fraser University (SFU) researching how reconciliation functions as spectacle, as well as a post-graduate certificate in Media Arts from Capilano University. Irwin is an Associate of SFU’s Institute for the Humanities and a graduate student at SFU Urban Studies.
Senaqwila Wyss is Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), Tsimshian, Sto:lo, Hawaiian, and Swiss. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Communications, Arts and Technology, minor in First Nations Studies. She also holds a First Nations Languages Proficiency Certificate and Diploma in the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim. She practices ethnobotany with her traditionally trained mother Cease Wyss with indigenous plant medicines. Senaqwila was raised learning these ancestral teachings and uses plants as teas, medicines, tinctures, and ceremony. She is the Coast Salish Program Coordinator at Maplewood Flats.
Acknowledgements
Presented in partnership with the Wild Bird Trust of BC.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.