Trans-siberian Orchestra rocks, baby.
Alberta will be solely represented at the Venice Biennale by an Edmonton artist exploring her Métis heritage.
In its architecture section opening Aug. 29, the worldrenowned Italian art festival will showcase work by Edmonton’s Tiffany ShawCollinge. Through several stages of competition and jury, she won a spot in Canada’s 2012 Biennale submission, a multi-province group exhibition called Migrating Landscapes.
In it, she’ll be tapping her culture with three models based on her great-grandfather’s trapline cabin near Fort Mcmurray.
“I’ve never been there, or met my great-grandfather,” Shaw-collinge notes over the phone from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where she’s chasing her master’s. “He passed away when I was little. But my middle name is Jeanine, named after him (Jean). There’s even a street in Fort Mcmurray named after him.
“I have this romantic view of the trapline. Some of my family members still go there, people who hunt. I was trying to think about my heritage because Migrating Landscapes is about cultural memory.”
Shaw-collinge came to explore her roots only in the last few years, with concerns in her family ironically making her wary of her own culture. “They never really wanted to acknowledge we were Métis,” she explains. “We would say it in passing … because some of my family members looked native and had a really hard time in the education system.
“When I applied for my master’s I realized I could apply for grant funding,” she says. “I am proud of this history. I loved the moccasins my greatgrandmother made for us and I loved the sense of history of the Métis Canadians I encountered working at ihuman,” she notes, referring to her work with the Edmonton youth arts outreach centre.
During the process, the former Scott Gallery employee connected with her cultural past — and her family not only bonded, but grew.
“When I got the status my whole family started to embrace it,” she notes. “They started getting the status as well. It’s funny how that works. My grandmother got it, my cousin, my aunt and my mom.
“It turned into a huge family effort because my greatgrandmother’s records were burned. We almost couldn’t prove she was born. It took a year and a half and I found out about all this history, all these cousins I never knew of. And suddenly had this sense of belonging I had never felt before.”
Artists use symbols to express their points, and ShawCollinge’s untitled triptych is rich with meaning. The cabins, each around six centimetres long, are made of different materials placed in a deliberate hierarchy she’s noted has elements of the Three Little Pigs fable. “The big bad wolf always says, ‘I’ll blow your house down,’ and this piece deals with an element of survival and weather.
“I put the leather cabin on the top because I thought it was the most stable, the oldest technology with the most history. Then I put the crocheted one in the middle, because that has a link to craft and the home, and the zip-tie one is at the bottom because it’s the newest thing that’s out there. I would never say the straw or the bricks is better than the other. In terms of weather or earthquakes, nothing is going to hold up, so you just never know,” she laughs.
The 30-year-old is a past curator behind notable Edmonton pop-up exhibitions The Apartment Show and The O ce Show.
For cohesion, all 18 Canadian Biennale pieces incorporate square-topped beams of wood as a base. “Each entrant can have their own voice but at the same time it’s this unified thing.”
Migrating Landscapes addresses ideas both universal and regionally Canadian. Some, like Shaw-collinge’s work, engage nostalgia and cultural identity. The artists and architects have unearthed references to unfinished basement suites of our youth, the waterfront of Saint John, even Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Other pieces are more conceptual, taking on ideas of rural versus urban, and migration itself.
Mexican-born Quebecer Enrique Enriquez notes for his piece: “As when you are sick you are aware of your body, the same happens on the act of migrating; you feel your body is wide-awake. The place you came from or where you are established become less relevant; you become the place.”
In another work, a block of the tightly cohered columns is missing sections, which appear to be wandering away from the core. Referring to a familiar brain drain they call the “Winnipeg Condition,” Manitoba’s Travis Cooke and Jason Kun ask, “When you leave, does a part of you stay? When someone leaves you, do they take a part of you with them?”
Canada has been participating in the Biennale since 1952, when it showcased work by Emily Carr after her death. For this year’s event, spanning months, a record 89 countries are participating.
Shaw-collinge hopes to attend, and will return to the city after she graduates.