Looking Up and Out
Laxa’ine’ gigukwdzikasi’ gigukwas Hayałiligase’
(The Many Large Houses of the Ghosts)
by Marianne Nicolson, Musgamakw Dzawada’enux First Nation, Kwakwaka’wakw/Canada
Nicolson presents her work as a guest to the great lakes woodlands region of Toronto outside of her ancestral territory as Kwakwaka’wakw on the west coast. Her animated projection on the Old City Hall clock tower manifests ghost stories from the dead of night, recalling the supernatural spirit world while addressing the institutional haunting of the building as a structure and symbol of the nation state and Toronto's history. She overwrites the Romanesque civic building and courthouse using animated projections of hand-drawn pictographs based in Indigenous oral traditions and languages. Nicolson builds on her investigations into the ongoing tension and unresolved history of dispossession between Indigenous and non-indigenous governance, colonial power and buildings as permanent markers on land and bodies.
Looking Up and Out
Laxa’ine’ gigukwdzikasi’ gigukwas Hayałiligase’
(The Many Large Houses of the Ghosts)
by Marianne Nicolson, Musgamakw Dzawada’enux First Nation, Kwakwaka’wakw/Canada
Nicolson presents her work as a guest to the great lakes woodlands region of Toronto outside of her ancestral territory as Kwakwaka’wakw on the west coast. Her animated projection on the Old City Hall clock tower manifests ghost stories from the dead of night, recalling the supernatural spirit world while addressing the institutional haunting of the building as a structure and symbol of the nation state and Toronto's history. She overwrites the Romanesque civic building and courthouse using animated projections of hand-drawn pictographs based in Indigenous oral traditions and languages. Nicolson builds on her investigations into the ongoing tension and unresolved history of dispossession between Indigenous and non-indigenous governance, colonial power and buildings as permanent markers on land and bodies.