OTTAWA — I first encountered multidisciplinary artist Skawennati in individual at her December 2019 discuss on the former McLuhan Centre for Communication and Know-how in Toronto. I recall that the artist wore Barbie-doll pink; I later discovered that she is a Barbie fan.
On the discuss, Skawennati launched herself as each an city Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) girl and a cyberpunk avatar. She mentioned her longtime observe of costuming avatars as a way of realizing Indigenous peoples’ self-determination within the Aboriginal Territories in Our on-line world (AbTeC) — a thriving, futuristic island she maintains within the digital world, Second Life. Later, she shared work-in-progress documentation for the venture Calico & Camouflage (2020–22), a trend line of Turtle Island “resistant wear” — her interpretation of conventional ribbon shirts and fight pants as Kanien’kehá:ka protest gear — for each avatars and IRL fashions.
On the time, I used to be taken by Skawennati’s dedication to working inside an enormous multiplayer digital world that was, in my opinion, a ghost city. She was adamant that if the platform had been to “sunset,” she would cease making her avatars: “In the end, I know it’s not mine,” she shared with me in a 2020 interview for an Artwork in America profile. The Montreal-based artist makes use of these characters, in addition to settings and backdrops she has constructed and designed in AbTeC, for her machinimas and machinimagraphs — movies and images produced inside digital worlds. “That’s why I take lots of pictures, lots of documentation. As long as you know you’re not actually in control, you have a lot of control.”
Set up view of Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreahouse on the Nationwide Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Foreground: the diptych “Dancing with Myself” (2015); background: “Birth of an Avatar (Homage to Mariko Mori)” (2017)
But, as her present Nationwide Gallery of Canada (NGC) mid-career survey Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreamhouse proves, the trajectory of the previous 25 years of her work lies not solely in these machinimas and machinimagraphs, but in addition in her burgeoning work with trend. The Calico & Camouflage assortment was a part of a flip in her understanding of the digital as more and more hybrid performative experiences involving garment-based sculptures and textiles. Throughout the NGC exhibition catalog, contributors Cheryl Sim and Mojean Sarah Behzadi make the case for the way formative Skawennati’s engagement with trend has been to her work total. As exhibition curator Wahsontiio Cross, of the NGC, writes within the accompanying catalog, her creation of trend and textiles has resulted within the artist lastly “bring[ing] her idea of the future into the present.”
The exhibition design for Welcome to the Dreamhouse, wherein every room is completely structured for its meant function, is harking back to the Barbie Dreamhouse, aligning Skawennati’s multidisciplinary works with open-ended play. Nevertheless, the artist clarified in dialog with Hyperallergic that she and Cross had been drawn towards the “dreamhouse” idea for its aspirational potential. “A dreamhouse feels attainable. It might take work, but people think they can achieve it. I wanted to say with this show, this concept, this title, that a peaceful and just future is attainable.”
Set up view of “Three Sisters: They Sustain Us” (2024), which incorporates the three-channel machinima, “Welcome to the Garden,” and the imagining of the three sisters as “Pre-Contact” (left) and “Colonization” (proper) iterations.
Among the many longstanding themes that carry by the present, a core motif is Indigenous futurism, whereby the ache of the colonial previous is labored by a “future imaginary.” The time period, coined by Skawennati and her accomplice and frequent collaborator, Jason Edward Lewis, reclaims historic narratives and facilities Indigenous peoples in “exploring new cultural configurations that will enable us not just to survive, but thrive.”
Throughout totally different galleries, guests encounter new and previous characters from the artist’s transferring and nonetheless picture works. Many contain Indigenous sci-fi retellings of Hotinonshón:ni cosmology and histories, starting from the creation story instructed in “She Falls For Ages” (2017) to the ancestral narrative of the Iroquois confederation, up to date to the yr 3025, in “The Peacemaker Returns” (2017).
Set up view of “She Falls For Ages” alongside “Circle Wampum” and “Otsitsakáion Cosplay Costume” (all works 2017)
Older machinimas, some initially offered as video installations in a white or black dice area, are immersive environments right here. The nine-part machinima that composes “TimeTraveller™” (2007–14) is a decolonial interpretation of the histories of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. I first noticed the work as a multi-channel video set up with wall-mounted tablets and headphones in a 2015 group exhibition at Toronto’s YYZ Artists’ Outlet. The present iteration recreates the luxurious lounge of the younger Twenty second-century Mohawk energy couple on the coronary heart of the machinima’s multitemporal romance, recalling an set up method in a 2015 solo exhibition on the Dunlop Artwork Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. (In actual fact, the exhibition’s dreamhouse idea stems from the ultimate episode of the machinima, when the couple encounters their potential new house.) Guests can lounge on a white leather-based sectional, having fun with a steady single-channel viewing of what nonetheless stays the artist’s opus. “TimeTraveller™” distills, inside an Indigenous sci-fi love story, how self-determined digital environments can heart resistance inside historic and futurist narratives.
With this exhibition, Cross foregrounded the robust, highly effective Kanien’kehá:ka ladies characters which have at all times been elementary to Skawennati’s artwork. “I feel like I have been so close to her work and practice for many years, since I was a student,” stated the curator, who can be from the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawà:ke. “Her work makes me very proud. Our culture is being put out there through her unique vision, and our stories are being perpetuated for these new generations in a way that can be shared with external Kahnawà:ke and Hotinonshón:ni communities.”
The machinimagraphs “Ó:nenhste” (2022) and “Onon’ósera” (2022) as portraits from the collection On the Event of the Three Sisters Accompanying xox on Her Go to to the Queen
There’s a deliberate emphasis in Welcome to the Dreamhouse on alter-egos, starting with “xox,” the artist’s cyberpunk avatar inside AbTeC. xox stars in a lot of Skawennati’s machinimas and machinimagraphs, such because the diptych “Dancing with Myself” (2015), wherein the artist additionally cosplays the avatar. The work hangs on the entryway of a fuchsia portrait gallery dedicated to xox. In a while, guests can have interaction with the hardly ever exhibited “Imagining Indians in the 25th Century.” The 2000 web-based interactive narrative options what might be the earliest Skawennati alter-ego, a younger, time-traveling blended Kanien’kehá:ka and Italian girl who journals and “plays” digital costume up as traditionally vital Indigenous ladies, like Pocahontas and the Mohawk/Algonquin Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha.
A more recent machinima within the NGC exhibition consists of “xox Visits the King” (2025), the place xox meets with King Charles III, securing reparations and the return of crown land. In the meantime, “Celestial Tree with Blossoms that Light the World” (2025), a “quilt constellation” impressed by a digital bedcover in her machinima “She Falls For Ages” (2017), closes the present.
“As a very small child, my first love was textiles,” Skawennati defined. “Returning to it has been wonderful. There’s a language to textiles and fashion that is more decipherable to people than the language of machinima or computation.” Whereas she stays pleased with her machinimas and her digitally created avatars and digital environments, she acknowledges that their immateriality might need induced “a bit of distrust” amongst a normal public turned off by the centralized energy of tech oligarchs. And, with a clearer understanding of the affect and prices of server farms, knowledge facilities, and AI techniques, she now acknowledges her personal mistrust in a our on-line world that’s now not honoring its open supply values.
“I am so happy to make physical things again,” she stated. “That’s actually the truth.”
Set up view of Skawennati’s nine-part machinma, “TimeTraveller™ (2007–14) (photograph Jennifer Park)
Among the garment-based sculptures that includes the style assortment element of Calico & Camouflage (2020–22)
A portrait gallery of assorted machinimagraphs that includes Skwennati’s cyberpunk avatar, xox
Set up view of Skawennati’s machinima “xox Visits the King” (2025)
Set up view of “Imagining Indians in the 25th Century” (2000)
Set up view of the 12-piece trend assortment Three Sisters: 4 Moments (2024), and, within the background, “Three Sisters: Reclaiming Abundance” (2023)
Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreamhouse continues on the Nationwide Gallery of Canada (380 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario) by September 1. The exhibition was curated by Wahsontiio Cross.
