Substrata

About

SUBSTRATA investigates the notion of surface and that which lies hidden beneath. Each artist brings to light the underlying strata of personal biography, ancestral memory, and contested landscapes that have informed their rich and diverse contemporary perspectives.

- Meryl McMaster - Sculptural photographer of Plains Cree and European descent, interrogates the constructed nature of identity using performative sculptural guises. She explores the invented personas and social masks that conceal us, inviting the viewer to question what is sacrificed from one’s interiority to the surface of a fixed image.

- Sonn Assu - Kwakwaka’wakw interdisciplinary artist, explores the contested territories of Canada’s Northwest Coast by overlaying indigenous iconography onto scanned navigational marine charts and digital renditions of 20th-century landscape paintings.

- Patrick Dean Hubbell - practice is rooted in a deep connection to his ancestral lands. Earth|Paradigm is a series of abstract paintings, representative of nature and the landscape, created using ochre and sienna-hued earth pigments gathered from his Navajo ancestral lands.

Sarah Sense - Of Choctaw and Chitimacha ancestry, weaves together found imagery and her own landscape photography using traditional basket-making techniques. Sense’s intricately structured compositions divulge a hidden network of perspectives, family ties and migratory paths.