BUSH gallery is a space for dialogue, experimental practice and community engaged work that contributes to an understanding of how gallery systems and art mediums might be transfigured, translated and transformed by Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance and land use systems. This model of decolonial, non-institutional ways to engage with and value Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous creative production is at the heart of BUSH gallery. BUSH gallery is a trans-conceptual gallery space. To be trans-conceptual is to reposition ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. A trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux – never settling, like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices which are born out of a lived connection to the land.

This gallery is out on the land, it is outside of or at the margins of monetary systems and away from the colonized space of art institutions. This gallery is a gallery of the land, of Indigenous culture(s) and language(s); this gallery can show new media with basketry, beading with installation art, performance art and storytelling.

BUSH gallery is alive and breathing.
BUSH gallery is on Indigenous Lands.
BUSH gallery is animate and inanimate at the same time.
BUSH gallery is radically inclusive – all bodies and
lands and kids and dogs and bears are welcome.
BUSH gallery requires new words.
BUSH gallery includes working the land.
BUSH gallery includes walking the land.
BUSH gallery includes conversations with kids.
BUSH gallery includes moms and dads and caregivers.
BUSH gallery includes all Indigenous languages
(within BUSH gallery, we understand that Indigenous languages are spoken with hands, with the movements of bodies, with the tongue, with the movements of mouths, with laughter, with tears, and with righteous anger).
BUSH gallery includes dogs.
BUSH gallery is in constant transition as the land is in constant transition.
BUSH gallery knows that disruption inspires growth.
BUSH gallery is a place of hope and no hope.

Our ancestors are buried there, in BUSH gallery.

BUSH gallery is not afraid of opinions.
BUSH gallery is not afraid of sharing our opinions.
BUSH gallery is not not-for-profit.
BUSH gallery is for Indigenous and non-Indigenous art and artists and curators and thinkings and grandmothers and grandfathers and fathers and mothers and cousins and aunties and uncles.
BUSH gallery is eating whipped berries under the stars, punctuating conversations and visits about art.
BUSH gallery is a space to make art, but the openings are attended by bears harvesting the last of the berries before hibernation and maybe the neighbours’ horses or cows are grazing, and there are crows, reservation dogs and the spirit of the land, lots of spirits.
BUSH gallery is an autonomous space… for birds.
BUSH gallery is human-led, Indigenous knowledge-based, we trace our impacts on the land in search of balance amidst our inherent selfish humanity.
BUSH gallery talks big, dreams bigger and doesn’t bother to walk its talk, we send our talk straight up to the stars and the sky, on the wings of eagles and hawks…
BUSH gallery can disappear.
BUSH gallery fits into our pockets.
BUSH gallery can be called into being and called out.
BUSH gallery is not one place, not one territory, not
one Nation, we trace out our family, our blood, our
belonging in cities, on reserves, in the BUSH, in the
suburbs, overseas and under mountains.
BUSH gallery believes in dreaming, and sleeping, and walking, and being.
BUSH gallery is sometimes nothing but opening your eyes and breathing in the land around you.
BUSH gallery hopes that art matters.
BUSH gallery is sometimes a blockade, sometimes a bridge, always a balancing beam.
BUSH gallery says sometimes you gotta stop dreaming and get to work, dig a well, hunt and grow food, chop wood, bury sunshine for later and give food to ghosts.
BUSH gallery is stick gambling for all the bragging rights.
BUSH gallery respects the land and is in love with it.
BUSH gallery means nothing if you are in the way of a bear and his berry patch, you better move it on.
BUSH gallery is performance, installation, craft, conceptual, painting, photography, stand up comedy, cooking, movie watching with trees and many other things you might call bullshit on ’cause they are not really art. But bullshit is part of BUSH gallery too.
BUSH gallery seeks to speak with many tongues, honouring Indigenous languages as a way to speak with, to and from the land. BUSH Gallery asks what does pop culture mean in the BUSH? If you hashtag the land, and no one is there with a cell phone, does the land even know it is on social media.
BUSH gallery; ants might crawl on your art, surprise rain might ruin or make your next work and you should think about carrying bear spray.
BUSH gallery starts now.
BUSH gallery ends here.
BUSH gallery will pitstop intermittently.
It is recommended you have your web browser settings
filter out any obscene images you may find when you
google search BUSH gallery – that means images of war leaders as well.
BUSH gallery is idea(s), place(s), story(ies), mood(s), artist(s), farmer(s), fighter(s), kid(s), the four-legged, the fish, the birds and the bugs, the stars and the water that makes us all.
BUSH gallery is yours and mine and no one’s.
BUSH gallery is going to blow up.
BUSH gallery sees the bush in the city.
BUSH gallery imagines what art for ourselves – not for the institutions of galleries, museums, history or academies – looks like.
BUSH gallery wonders what art can do.

BUSH gallery works towards Indigenous resurgence.

BUSH gallery is expanded, not limited, by tradition.
BUSH gallery is feminist.
BUSH gallery remembers the things we never knew.
BUSH gallery is inauthentic.
BUSH gallery is unsettled.
BUSH gallery is representative and abstract.
BUSH gallery is on the land, researches land, goes to the land, because land is the foundation of Indigenous life and Indigenous struggle.
BUSH gallery is a place where knowledge is open-ended.
BUSH gallery thanks the land.