A faculty exhibition featuring works by:
Lin Xu, Lisa Wood, Kevin McKenzie & Kevin Ei-Ichi deForest
Curated by Dr. Stacey Koosel
Nostalgiacore is a contemporary art exhibition that features paintings, ceramic sculptures, photography, drawings, sound and immersive installations by the professors who make up the faculty of the IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University. The theme of the exhibition is a play on an aesthetic movement in popular culture that finds nostalgia and longing in everyday and liminal places. The exhibition explores the concept of nostalgia in a variety of iterations and mediums, from personal relationships to the past, to longings for places, spaces, and people who no longer exist.
Recently I moved back to the prairies, after having lived in many different places. Coming back to the infinite horizon of the prairie topography felt like going back to my youth in the 1990s in rural Alberta. That way of reframing, coming back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, instead of staring down the barrel of a brave new place and all the discomfort of the unknown, shapes the way I see and interpret my world around me. So when I was introduced to my new colleagues’ art practices, I kept seeing what I was already feeling, a sense of solace and strength in a foundation from the past.
Kevin McKenzie’s new painting series Being Indigenous (2023) also brings the artist back to his youth in Saskatchewan in the 1970s. When he was 17 years old his father passed away. The results of intergenerational trauma left the artist feeling frozen in time, stuck at the age of 17. He would later explore this formative moment in his MFA thesis exhibitions, Edge of Seventeen at the Dunlop Gallery. When the artist found inspiration from boxes of comic books that belonged to a brother who passed away, he was once again transported back to being 17 again. Conan the Barbarian became a Cree hero, as the artist could control the narrative and messages, the fantasy character became a vehicle to relay Indigenous identity, wisdom, humour and pride.
Lin Xu’s Pillow Series – Vestiges (2021 – 2023) feature little figures emerging from cracks in their deceptively hard ceramic pillow world. The fantasy-like ecosystems around them hint at symbols and signs: feathers, a dragonfly wing, brains, tentacles, pools of kaleidoscope colours. I interpreted the emerging brave little figures as the collective post-pandemic world of venturing out again, leaving our safe inner sanctums and surveying the new surroundings. When I told the artist this, she laughed and said she would rather go back inside the pillow.
Lisa Wood’s The Dinner Parties series (2020 – 2023) depicts meals eaten with other female artists over the course of a few years, where discussions of balancing careers as artists and family lives, and the challenges of gender inequities were meticulously documented in video and audio, and translated into drawings, paintings and an audio composition. The hand gestures and facial expressions of the artists in conversation are frozen in time, the ephemeral words and thoughts documented, analyzed, re-interpreted and cemented in time.
Kevin Ei-Ichi deForest’s watercolour Walks With Hanako series (2021 – 2023) capture the everyday life of an artist walking with his dog Hanna through different seasons and mindscapes. The meditative paintings capture the artist’s thoughts and emotions at that time, perhaps also what Hanna is smelling, sensing and feeling too. The artist lost both his dog and his mother in 2022, and the installation is a tribute to them, with Hanna’s bed and a tatami mat with a quilt made of his mother’s clothing, that invite the visitor to sit in the installation The Same Sweetness (2023) and listen to the CD player.
The four artists in the exhibition each have their individual artistic practices and as artists working in academia, their art is their research – it is the process, result and documentation of research into specialized topics, fields, mediums and ways of knowing. Finding a common thread or theme to weave a story for you, the visitor is my creative task as a curator, as well as researching the artist and their practice. Nostalgiacore is a way of seeing, empty back alleys lined with garbage cans in the dead of winter, belongings of loved ones no longer with us, conversations that happened and what they meant, and times and places where we felt safe in our own little worlds.
Dr. Stacey Koosel – January 17, 2024, Brandon University
As a special note I would like to thank Curatorial Assistant Haylee Janai for all her support with this exhibition, my colleagues for being wonderful, and finally Black Wheat Brewing for sponsoring the exhibition opening.
Kevin Ei-ichi deForest (b. 1962) was born in Winnipeg and received a BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal in 1994. He has studied and exhibited nationally and internationally. Through his painting and installation, he reflects on his Eurasian (Swiss and Japanese) cultural hybridity to develop a visual language that does justice to a multi-faceted notion of identity.
He is interested in popular culture as a vehicle for not only entertainment but critical thinking as well as a mirror of societal values. His recent work is more intimately tied to celebrating the passing of both his parents as well as the family dog. Although many fine art media are now identified as “traditional”, deForest demonstrates that oil paint and watercolour can still be relevant and contemporary. He is an Associate Professor in IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University.
Kevin McKenzie (b. 1969) is Cree/Métis, born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He is a member of the Cowessess First Nation of Saskatchewan, Treaty 4. He holds a BFA and an MFA from the University of Regina. During his 30-year art practice, McKenzie has exhibited nationally and internationally, notable exhibitions include Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation II, Museum of Arts and Design, New York. He also participated in Don’t Stop Me Now, National Gallery of Canada. If We Never Met, Pataka Art Gallery Museum, New Zealand. His work is represented in Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institute, New York, November 2017- Jan. 2019. His work was selected as the inaugural exhibition titled ASAP at Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Satellite Gallery Santa Fe, via Vital Spaces Santa Fe, NM USA.
McKenzie’s artwork is represented in the collections of; the National Gallery of Canada, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, Manitoba Hydro Corporation, the President’s Art Collection University of Regina, First Nations University of Canada, Comox Valley Art Gallery,the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Dunlop Art Gallery. He has a permanent public sculpture in Whistler B.C. commissioned by VANOC Cultural Olympiad 2010. In 2022 he was commissioned by the President’s Office at Brandon University to produce a public sculpture dedicated to Truth and Reconciliation titled “Healing Together”.
McKenzie lives in Brandon Manitoba and works at Brandon University as an Assistant Professor at IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg (IWGI) Department of Visual Art.
Lisa Wood (b.1979) holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Yale University (2005) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Manitoba (2002). Her figurative art practice broadly investigates inclusion, marginalization and interpersonal connections that are facilitated or revealed over food. She has been the recipient of many awards and scholarships and exhibits her painting and prints nationally and internationally at venues such as Warte Für Kunst, Germany (2017), The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (2019), Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre (2017), Gallery 1C03 (2016), and Julie Saul Gallery, NYC (2012). In 2020 she was commissioned to paint the official portrait commemorating the outgoing President of the University of Winnipeg, Dr.Annette Trimbee.
Her installation The Dinner Parties consists of portraits and audio collages that document the experiences of professional artists who are marginalized by gender. Wood prepared, hosted and documented one-on-one meals with nine artists with diverse intersectional identities in order to recognize the work of artists in the context of late capitalism and colonization in Canada. As an artist who is a woman and mother living with chronic illness, Wood has found that a key strategy to survive and thrive in the Canadian professional art world is to connect with other gender marginalized artists to share information, witness struggles and triumphs, and devise strategies for navigating colonial, patriarchal spaces.
She is an Associate Professor in IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University.
Lin Xu (b. 1971) is a ceramics artist and an educator who has lived and worked in Brandon Manitoba since 2004. Born in Inner Mongolia, China, Lin holds a Master of Fine Arts from Washington State University, USA, a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of Sydney, Australia, and a Bachelor of Science in Packaging Engineering from Jilin University, China.
After two years of teaching Ceramics and Drawing in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Washington State University, Lin took up a teaching position at Brandon University and successfully established the ceramics program within the former Department of Visual and Aboriginal Art. Lin’s ceramics sculptural work explores the hidden energy within clay through its complex and fascinating transformation process into ceramics. Some themes include the use of universal symbols and objects, the ideas of memory, re-birth, identity-revolution, solitude and human relationships, and the creation of metaphysical spaces that inspire imaginations. Lin’s work has been exhibited both in Canada and internationally, including the US, Japan, France, Hong Kong, Spain, and China.
She is an Associate Professor in IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University.
Lisa Wood, The Dinner Parties Series, Video walk through.
Audio artwork: Success?; Digital Audio File, Multi-channel (Stereo), Audio Composition by Lisa Wood, Audio Editing by Brendon Ehinger, Qualitative Analysis by Lisa Wood, Nikki Brasseur and Dr. Breanna Lawrence, 3:55, 2023. Video by Brendon Ehinger
Click to enlarge image
