I continue to shape

History, like all stories, is told slant, subject to distortion by those with the power to represent it. In the telling, certain characters are foregrounded and certain power dynamics are obscured, leaving certain other characters—their perspectives and experiences—cast out of this immortal glow. And yet, it seems that aesthetic practices bear a specific capacity to transform the sediment of history into something moving once again, to puncture what seems solid, to redirect the light.

The capacity for artworks to provoke this kind of shift is often tied to their ability to conjure visceral and intuitive responses that percolate through the viewer, from a change in mood or disposition, to an evolving understanding of the relation between actors, objects and society. Philosopher and artist David Garneau has coined the term “extra-rational aesthetic action” to describe the possibilities that reside in encounter with works of this sort. Drawing upon Garneau’s study, the Art Museum’s new exhibition considers how the extra-rational capacities of art can support interruptions of history such that new kinds of stories become possible to tell.

The title of the exhibition, I continue to shape, references an observation of participating artist Nicholas Galanin’s, that contemporary Indigenous cultures, like all other cultures, exist on a continuum of change based on engagements with others and in dialogue with land. The “I” of I continue to shape is both the artist’s subjectivity bearing upon the world, as much as it is the “I” of the viewer, coming to terms with how else to understand their role in upholding or dismantling the structures we have inherited, and how they are capable of shaping personal and cultural relationships.

I continue to shape looks to the practices of artists as a means of working toward futures otherwise. By challenging colonial habits and tending to the labour that such re-orientation implies, these artists envision expanded aesthetic and political narratives, alternative forms of community building and belonging, and propose survival strategies up to the tasks at hand in shaping a world more tender, more just and more unsettled than the world we have now.