ID Number

Title

Item Name

Culture

Material

Date Made

Maker

Place Made

Date Owned

Owner

Acquisition Date

Source

Source

Source

Measurements

Condition

Accession Number

Description

Lightbox photograph. Large digital photographic print mounted inside a painted, wood-framed lightbox, painted black. Print depicts three figures wearing grey camouflage on a mountainside. The mountainside stretches from the top left to the bottom right corner of the horizontal print. In the other half of the image, the cloudy sky is shown and another trapezoid-shaped mountain is visible in the background. The three figures are spaced evenly along the mountainside and are shown in profile. The figure higher up the slope is sitting with knees bent, head down and arms circling their knees. Figure in middle is most in focus, shown kneeling on the ground, head bent forward, with their arms stretched out in front. The figure towards the bottom of the slope is sitting with their back to the camera, with their head tilted down, leaning back on their right arm. The mountainside is covered in an assortment of grey, brown and white rocks, and pieces of obsidian.

Cultural Context

contemporary art

Narrative

Integral to Tsēmā’s work is what she describes as “connecting bodies to the LAND.” Her performances, installations, and other artworks engage with, and witness, how land and natural resources are accorded wealth, and how corporate resource extraction reverberates in material and metaphysical landscapes. In her larger body of work, Our Ancestors’ Trail: Real Camo, of which this image is a part, the artist engages with Tahltan territory and the pathways her ancestors walked. In this work, in particular, she focuses on sacred Mount Edziza, the extraordinary source of valuable obsidian (volcanic glass) that was traded throughout what is now British Columbia and into Alaska and Alberta . A close look at the image reveals that every black speck is a piece of obsidian flaked by a Tahltan ancestor. Located throughout the photograph are images of Tsēmā – traces of her actual performance on the mountain, and her movement over the land. The artist is wearing camouflage fabric that she created from a photographic image of the obsidian flakes. As Tsēmā writes, "My artistic work grapples with the body, my body as it has witnessed material and metaphysical landscapes changing and continually impacted, shaken and consumed by corporate resource extraction. What is important to me in making and presenting my work is to engage with and critique how the value of land and natural resources are created and assessed through Western measures of wealth (social, economic, environmental, power, ownership) and how these types of evaluations impact cultural lifeways in the Canadian wilderness, which is still considered an untapped frontier for natural resources. My praxis is sparked by strategies of Indigenous resistance to neo-colonization, embodied knowledge and everyday acts of decolonization as ways to understand the imaginary Canadian “true North” and industrial reverberations felt by those who live downstream."