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Mackenzie

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Workman 1

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Editorial

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.

Site/ation

issue-136-p6-8.pdf

Indigenous

Landscape

Collective

Manifesto

The BUSH Manifesto outlines BUSH Gallery’s decolonial and non-institutional praxis by stating both what the gallery is and what it is not.

THE BUSH MANIFESTO

**Peter Morin** is a Tahltan Nation performance artist and writer. His work focuses on decolonization through the centering of Tahltan knowledges and practice.

> This year, the annual guest edited issue of _C Magazine_ has been organized by artist Peter Morin and artist and curator Tania Willard. Together they represent two members of a shifting group of Indigenous artists that make up BUSH gallery – an experimental land-based, Indigenous-led artist rez-idency that takes place on Willard’s land in Secwepemc Nation in interior British Columbia.

> This is a very special issue of _C Magazine_. Part of this lies in the fact that it focuses inwardly, with the texts circling back to friendship, kinship and often to the specific plot of land at BUSH gallery where many of the contributors in these pages have gathered to think and work. But the texts, interviews, poems, scores and artworks within also extend far beyond BUSH gallery, provoking critical discussion of where and how art exists – and has existed for thousands of years – on the land, outside of city centres, gallery systems and western systems of valuation. With many thanks to Peter, Tania and BUSH gallery for their radical work herein. — Kari Cwynar, Editor

BUSH gallery is located on the traditional territories of the Secwepemc Nation, hosted on Tania Willard’s land. BUSH gallery is a series of on-going gatherings of like-minded folks united under questions concerning art making, land, Indigenous art history and interventions into the colonial. These gatherings focus on experimental investigations that enable the complexities of Indigenous knowing along with an active disengagement with western logic.

In this issue of _C Magazine_ we dared to ask this question about land: does it still mean art if we make it on the reserve? We dared to ask this question about art: does it help us to realize the depth of Indigenous art history when we make art on the reserve outside of gallery and museum systems? We present here a decolonization of the idea of an art magazine or an art review or art writing or art criticism. We asked writers to consider the future and space-making. We asked writers to consider and acknowledge the creative force of the body. Instead of reviewing the places art circulates in dominantly non-Indigenous institutions, we called on writers to review experiences, exhibitions, events or lands close to their heart. We asked them to give voice to aesthetic experiences in their communities, defining community generatively to include spaces on and off reserve, Indigenous or non-Indigenous spaces in which they find home and cultural continuity and safety. We asked writers to de-centre the city as the place of contemporary art, to ask ourselves what it means for contemporary art conversations to circulate in rural or non-art spaces.

BUSH gallery opens up space to experience all of the complexities that build contemporary Indigenous art, Indigenous knowledge, history, ancestors and future ancestors fusing time streams in a nonlinear constellation of meaning, history and futurity. Within these pages is an interrogation of the established structures of meaning within english language, and an active questioning of the unnamed and silent barriers that keep us just one foot away from an imagined and inherited futurity.

There are no contemporary art galleries or artist-run centres on First Nation reserves/reservations because people have been too busy surviving. Art is both a record and a future. In these pages, we want to ask the spirits: is it a good idea to have Indigenous art galleries on a reserve or on the land? What do Indigenous artist-run centres look like on lndian land? And when they do happen on reserve land, do they just feel like artist-run centres in cities?

The reader is invited to plant these pages in the ground for mother earth to read.

Writer

Editor

issue-136-p8-9.pdf

Artist-run centres

Activism

Infrastructure

Colonialism

Guest editors Peter Morin and Tania Willard, introduced by editor Kari Cwynar, introduce their direction for the issue and offer insight into the ethos of BUSH gallery. New approaches to art and art experience are introduced, de-centring conventional institutions as art hallmarks and instead, focusing on themes of specificity, colonization, and indigenous futurity.

Editorial: Site/ation