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Unsettling Conservation Collective: Reworldings

Curated by

Alexandra Nordstrom

Over the past two years, the Unsettling Conservation Collective has catalyzed a series of projects that challenge dominant understandings of how Land and Water are used, valued, and protected. Rooted in collaborative creative practice and Indigenous knowledge systems, artists Glenn Gear, Melaw Nakehk’o, Sheri Osden Nault, Adrian Stimson, and Michelle Wilson centre relationships of care, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity that underpin connections that have long been erased or obscured by settler colonial frameworks of conservation and preservation. Drawing together installation, video, audio, and material-based approaches, Reworldings speaks to living relationships with place and peoples, to the interdependence of species and systems, and to the urgent need to restore not only ecosystems, but also justice.

Across the globe, nation-states like Canada have made Land and Water their own by drawing, defining, and creating borders to mark the extent of their property and control. Conservation has often served this colonial agenda, justifying the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous communities by relying on an enduring fiction—that the places being protected exist empty, unmoving, and isolated from human presence or history. Reworldings unsettles this myth and the structures it supports, challenging the belief that environmental care requires human absence or top-down management. In contrast, the exhibition highlights the leadership of Indigenous communities who have long stewarded their territories through systems of governance grounded in kinship, balance, and accountability. These systems centre observation, listening, and reflection as essential to moving forward in a good way. Today, this leadership is further embodied in the movement for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), which represents a profound shift in conservation—one that re-centres Indigenous sovereignty, law, and knowledge.

Grounded in specific sites with layered and contested histories—Batoche National Historic Site (Nault), Waterton Lakes National Park (Stimson), Hopedale, Nunatsiavut (Gear), Thaidene Nëné Protected and Conserved Area (Nakehk’o), and Wood Buffalo National Park (Wilson)—Reworldings explores how art can repair relationships while imagining new and lasting ones. The exhibition is part of the broader work of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), a network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators committed to supporting Indigenous-led conservation across Canada.

Sponsors
government of ontario logo

Guest curated by Alexandra Nordstrom, Reworldings is organized and presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council—an agency of the Government of Ontario—SSHRC-CRHS, and Parks Canada.

About the curator

Alexandra Nordstrom

Alexandra Nordstrom is a cultural worker, curator, researcher, writer, and art historian living and working in Montréal, Quebec. Multidisciplinary in nature, her work focuses on the resurgence and study of Indigenous knowledge systems and cultures with a particular focus on Cree Worldviews, land-based learning, and creative practice. Nordstrom holds an MA in Art History from Concordia University (2020) and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia. She is a co-curator of the Poundmaker Museum and Gallery and is one of the co-directors of Sarasa Performance Laboratory Inc. (formerly Miyawata Culture Inc.).

About the artists

Glenn Gear

Glenn Gear is a Newfoundland-born, Montréal-based artist working with experimental animation and intermedia. He is of mixed Inuit ancestry from Nunatsiavut, Labrador. His current work centres around individual and collective history, exchange between Indigenous and settler populations, folklore, gender, and archives. Gear has a BFA in Photography from Memorial University, Newfoundland and an MFA in Sculpture and Installation from Concordia University, Montréal. He has worked in animation, video, drawing, collage, and installation, often employing experimental techniques in both digital and analog forms. Many of his animations have a dream-like quality as narratives are woven together through visual and metaphorical layers. His films have screened across Canada and throughout the world.

Melaw Nakehk’o

Melaw Nakehk’o is Dehcho Dene and Denesuline, born and raised in Denendeh (Northwest Territories). She is a visual artist who paints, sews, and beads, as well as a traditional moosehide tanner. Her work in reviving and teaching moosehide tanning techniques has inspired a resurgence of the practice and shaped a broader community building movement within Canada. Nakehk’o is continuously working creatively through performance art, contemporary visual art, public art, filmmaking, graphic recording, and teaches land-based Indigenous art practices. She is a Founding Member of Dene Nahjo. Melaw has three sons and lives in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

Sheri Osden Nault

Sheri Osden Nault is a Two-Spirit Métis artist, Indigenous tattoo practitioner, community worker, and Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Western Ontario. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. They work through embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous Futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing and learning from more than human kin. Their research is grounded in their experiences and engages with decolonizing methodologies, queer theory, ecological theory, and intersectional and Indigenous feminisms. They are a tattooer, researcher, and organizer within the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada and they run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth. They also operate the Melancholy Queers Club, though this project has slowed down, for which they create and vend DIY shirts and zines.

Adrian Stimson

Adrian Stimson is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and installation. His work is held in national and international collections, and is especially known for the recurring presence of bison. A member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, he holds a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art & Design and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Stimson has received numerous accolades, including the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award (2009), the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2003), the Alberta Centennial Medal (2005), the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award from The Hnatyshyn Foundation, and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2018).

Michelle Wilson

Michelle Wilson is a queer, neuro-divergent artist and mother currently residing as an uninvited guest in London, Ontario. Her work focuses on artistic collaboration as anti-colonial care work, which means she rejects individualistic conceptions of the artist and instead prioritizes working at the periphery, making space for a diversity of hands to come together through creation. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Guelph and teaches at OCADU and Fanshawe College.


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