As regularly evidenced by social and political events, Indigenous issues remain central to both Canadian and US political life. The Idle No More movement, important rulings by both the Federal Court and the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as the confrontation in the Maritimes between Mi’kmaq and the RCMP over fracking for shale gaz, indicate the ever-present political reality of Indigenous people. These prominent issues demonstrate, at least from the perspective of settler-society, that Indigenous sovereignty exists as loud and noisy confrontations with Euro-Canadian society.

Through his project exhibited at articule, Métis artist Dylan Miner will explore the “silence of sovereignty”. Interested in the quotidian and everyday experience of Indigenous spaces, Miner will produce a series of nearly-silent field recordings on reservations and reserves, as well as in off-reserve and urban Native environments. These recordings done in autonomous, as well as colonized, Indigenous territories in Canada and the United States, will serve as the creative impetus to a series of prints on and of mundane objects and tools, as well as to a site-specific installation using everyday materials.

By using the language of anti-capitalist activism and Indigenous visuality, Dylan Miner makes intentionally unrefined objects that challenge artistic ambiguity by operating within a tradition of political didacticism and egalitarian cooperation. Conceptually, his artistic practice orbits around minwaajimo, the ability to tell a story well. Therefore, Miner employs art as an attempt to narrate a particular anti-colonial and anti-capitalist desire. By collaborating with Indigenous and immigrant communities, as well as working in collectives, he remakes history and reterritorializes colonized spaces.

 

Dylan Miner (Métis) is Associate Professor at Michigan State University, where he coordinates a new Indigenous Contemporary Art Initiative. He holds a PhD from The University of New Mexico and has published more than fifty journal articles, book chapters, critical essays and encyclopedia entries. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). Since 2010, he has been featured in thirteen solo exhibitions and been artist-in-residence at institutions such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, École supérieure des beaux-arts in Nantes, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Rabbit Island, Santa Fe Art Institute, and various universities. His artwork has been the subject of articles or reviewed in publications including ARTnews, Canadian Art, c magazine, Indian Country Today, First American Art Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Måg Magazine, and Chicago Sun-Times, among others. Miner is descended from the Miner-Brissette-L’Hirondelle-Kennedy families with ancestral ties to Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes, Prairies and subarctic regions.  His book Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty and Lowriding across Turtle Island is being published this year by the University of Arizona Press.

Exhibitions  

Participating Artists: Dylan Miner (Métis, États-Unis)
Curator(s):
Credits: Image : Dylan Miner, Wallpaper (detail), 2015  dylanminer.com