DDM Speakers: Indigenizing the White Cube / Turning Back the Gaze
Visual artist and educator Mimi Gellman will talk about her perspectives on how to convey Indigenous sovereignty in exhibit environments.
The white cube represents the hybrid and sterile gallery space. It proposes a colonial model of appropriation of indigenous histories. Mimi will talk about her perspectives on how we can deconstruct the white cube in order to convey Indigenous sovereignty in exhibit environments.
Mimi Gellman is an Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi Métis visual artist and educator with a multi-streamed practice in architectural glass, drawing and painting and conceptual installation. Her family hails from Rat River Settlement, Manitoba and she sits with the Medewewe (the Rattlesnake) clan. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada and completed her PhD, Between the Dreamtime and the GPS/ the Metaphysics of Indigenous Mapping, in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, in 2019. Mimi’s interdisciplinary work explores phenomenology and technologies of intuition through an embodied practice of walking and mapping and through works and installations that point to the animacy and agency of objects. The cross-cultural dialogue exemplified in her work brings forward decolonial aesthetic perspectives and suggests a pre-existing connection to the other-than-human worlds. It is her cosmological orientation, in other words, her Ojibway/Métis worldview and the language that expresses it that predisposes her to be open to the reality of the spirit and life of objects and their ability to communicate across diverse thresholds. She continues to exhibit internationally, with recent exhibitions in France, Germany and Tokyo and was included in the seminal exhibition, "On Line/Drawing Through the Twentieth Century" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her work can be found in the collections of Price-Waterhouse, Kraft/General Foods Corp, the Toronto Transit Commission and Rogers Stadium, among many others.
This talk will take place over Zoom:
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 620 4060 1359
Passcode: 011758
Funded by the Ian Gillespie
Faculty of Design and Dynamic Media.