Stephen Foster: Re-mediating Curtis; Remix

stephen foster re-mediating curtis: remix

Stephen Foster Re-mediating Curtis: Remix

Vernon Public Art Gallery October 24 - December 23, 2013

Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3 www.vernonpublicartgallery.com 250.545.3173

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Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon, British Columbia, V1T 2H3, Canada October 24 - December 23, 2013 Production: Vernon Public Art Gallery Editor: Lubos Culen Layout and Graphic Design: Vernon Public Art Gallery Text proofing: Jamie Friesen Photography and video: Stephen Foster Introduction: Lubos Culen Guest writer contributor: Steven Loft Cover Image: Romantic Savage, 1994, single channel video installation, 15mins loop Printing: Get Smarter Copies, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada ISBN 978-1-927407-10-3 Copyright Š 2013, Vernon Public Art Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the Vernon Public Art Gallery. Requests for permission to use these images should be addressed in writing to the Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3, Canada.

Telephone: 250.545.3173 Facsimile: 250.545.9096 Website: www.vernonpublicartgallery.com The Vernon Public Art Gallery is a registered not-for-profit society. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing financial support of the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee/RDNO, the City of Vernon, the Province of BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, British Columbia Arts Council, Canadian Heritage, Corporate Donations, Sponsorships, Foundation Grants, General Donations and Memberships.

Charitable Organization # 108113358RR.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by:

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table of CONTENTS

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Executive Director’s Foreword · by Dauna Kennedy Grant

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Stephen Foster: Re-mediating Curtis: Remix · by Lubos Culen

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Stephen Foster: Remediating Mediated Media · by Steven Loft

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Re-mediating Curtis: Remix · by Stephen Foster Stephen Foster · Curriculum Vitae

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Art provides a vibrant, tangible reflection of a society’s aspirations, values, beliefs, and hopes. It is a vital expression of every society. Tantus is committed to developing contemporary Canadian visual arts by encouraging artists in their pursuit of research and expression in all creative forms.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Executive Director’s Foreword

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to write this foreword for such a significant body of work by Stephen Foster, a Kelowna based Artist and Professor at UBC Okanagan. The Vernon Public Art Gallery strives to exhibit contemporary art that challenges our perceptions and opens the door for creative discourse from our viewers. Foster’s exploration into the work of Edward Sheriff Curtis, creator of the film In the Land of the Headhunters, forces us to examine not only the validity of stereotypes, but the accuracy of photographic/media documentation as a historical representation.

On behalf of the Board of Directors and myself, I’d like to thank all of the people who contributed to this project. Stephen Foster for successfully creating this opportunity to challenge us to interact with and question what we see in the digital and media images before us. Lubos Culen, our Curator and author of the enclosed curatorial essay. Steven Loft, National Visiting Trudeau Fellow, Ryerson University Scholar-inResidence, Ryerson Image Centre, whose contributed essay focuses on the media aspects of Foster’s work and to all of our staff, thank you for your combined efforts to bring this project to fruition.

Bruce Acton of Tantus graciously sponsored this exhibition and provided us with a statement on the preceding page of this publication. It is such a pleasure to have local businesses that recognize the value of investing in the production and dissemination of contemporary art.

Vernon Public Art Gallery received its first Canada Council for the Arts project grant for this exhibition, a testament to the quality and level of work that is being presented. I also would like to acknowledge our ongoing funders who provide the operational funding for the gallery on a year round basis. You can see the full list on the copyright page.

This body of work demonstrates the powerful and lasting influence an artist’s work can have on societal perceptions, both negative and positive.

Dauna Kennedy Grant Executive Director Vernon Public Art Gallery

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stephen foster: re-mediating curtis: remix

by Lubos culen

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Romantic Savage, 1994, single channel video installation, 15mins loop. (The video introduces a multi-layered narrative voiceover remixing and reconfiguring appropriated imagery from In the Land of the Headhunters by E.S. Curtis, 1914.)

Stephen Foster: Re-Mediating Curtis: Remix

Stephen Foster is a Kelowna BC based digital media artist of Canadian First Nations and European descent.

His work generally addresses the issues of cultural identity, cultural stereotypes and colonial history. In recent years, Foster has started to develop an extensive body of work under an umbrella title Re-mediating Curtis, which is intended to be exhibited in a succession of exhibitions with the new content included in each itineration. The project objective is a critique and reflection on the Edward Curtis’ film In the Land of the Head Hunters (produced in 1914) and its influence on popular images and stereotypes of what Foster refers to as ‘Indianness’.

The exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery titled Re-Mediating Curtis: Remix is based on Foster’s research of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ film In the Land of Head Hunters together with the digital re-creation of the film sets used in the film. Foster’s work reveals the artificial structure underlying Curtis’ film project while highlighting the complexities of issues of indigenous representation in popular culture and his contribution to the understanding of indigenous identity based on a proposition advocating for a non Eurocentric base to the understanding of cultural identity.

Despite the fact that Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868 – 1952) was considered an ethnologist and gifted photographer by the ethnologists involved in the research of Native communities in America in the past, there has been a strong criticism of his work by some contemporary researchers. In the twenty volume publication titled The North American Indian (published in early 1900), Curtis included images of indigenous peoples which he produced over a period of many years when he travelled to Native communities throughout the United States. The photographs were staged and in many cases he paid natives to pose in artificially created settings. Curtis often removed all articles of daily use which Native Americans appropriated from the Western material culture. Often, the sitters wore historically inaccurate clothing and participated in simulated ceremonies or other daily activities.1 While Curtis intended to capture the North American Native peoples in their pre-contact culture untouched

by Western society, the result reinforced the stereotypical notion of a ‘noble savage’ and a ‘vanishing race’. In the early 1900s during releases of the volumes of The North American Indian, the artificiality of Curtis’ photographs detracted attention from the real situation that North American Native people were experiencing. Their rights were often denied, the federal government did not recognize treaties from the past, and the American Native people lived in poor conditions on the reserves.2 Gerald Vizenor, the author of “Edward Curtis: Pictorialist and Ethnographic Adventurist” offers an in-depth critique of Curtis’ work by advancing the argument which situated Curtis’ work in the tradition of Pictorialist aesthetics where the

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In the Land of The Headhunters: Potlatch Dancers, 2013, Inkjet print for backlit light box, 48 X 60 in.

Exhibited at Kelowna Art Gallery in 2013 in the exhibition Re-mediating Curtis: Toy Portraits.

photographers ‘created’ an image as opposed to documenting reality. Vizenor also points out that despite Curtis’ Pictorialist nature of images of Native American peoples, the images were often interpreted as ethnographic records.3 Most of the critique of Edward Curtis’ photographic work points out that the approach to indigenous representation was couched in an idealized and factually fabricated photographic portrayal of indigenous peoples in North America. Similarly, he produced the first motion picture portraying the North American peoples in film titled In the Land of Head Hunters (1914) filmed on Deer Island near Fort Rupert on Northern Vancouver Island in British Columbia with a cast of people from Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) communities.

This was a full-feature film with a fictitious narrative, and like Curtis’ photographic records, the film’s narrative was set in pre-contact era. Just like Curtis’ photo-based work, the film has been criticized for the portrayal of practices which were abandoned for decades before the film was made.4 Curtis’ film In the Land of Head Hunters has been Stephen Foster’s source of research regarding various topics of cultural identity, stereotypical views of indigenous peoples, and colonialism in Canada. Just like Foster, there are many other contemporary Canadian indigenous artists whose work deals with the colonial legacy in Canada and in order to advance the on-going project within the context of postcolonial discourse, Foster has been engaged with other First Nations artists including Marie Clemens, Kent Monkman, Brian Jungen, Shelly Niro, KC Adams and others. Similar to Foster’s personal experiences, the experiences of these artists provide insight and a reference point to a better understanding of how Curtis’ film affected their own experiences within the context of ethnography and its connection to popular images of indigenous peoples.

Foster uses video as the main means of artistic production in his studio practice, and the project ReMediating Curtis: Remix further incorporates a 3D video model of the original film set on Deer Island derived from the footage of Curtis’ film In the Land of the Head Hunters. The three channel projection of 3D and conventionally formatted video sequences enhances the actual video installation and creates an environment for the viewers to navigate. The motion of the visitors passing by the projection screens trigger the motion sensors which will in turn trigger different sequences of audio/video narrations played back from two different audio/video sources via speakers positioned in all four corners of the gallery space.

Foster’s interactive video installation was designed to involve the viewers and encourage their participation and engagement with the work. By installing the motion sensors monitoring the viewers’ movement, the viewers are able to a certain extent manipulate the audio/video components of the installation and recreate its content in multiple iterations. Video and audio components of the exhibition are played back in different sequences based on the viewers’ trajectories through the gallery space resulting in a non-linear narrative structure of presentation.

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Static, 2004, centre monitor of three-channel video installation titled Playing Indian: Burn, Static and Squelch, 3mins.

The three video projections are arranged in the gallery space where the central video is projected on a screen installed diagonally in the centre of the gallery space. An additional two projections are projected on the gallery walls on either side of the central screen. The central video projection is a 3D digitally created video model of Curtis’ film set. The image slowly rotates in a 360 degree side view revealing the structure from all sides. The slow rotation of the 3D digital model is somewhat meditative, but at the same time serves as a metaphor for the artificiality of Curtis’ undertaking by revealing the hollow structure of the back side of the film set. A looping line of text is also running above the rotating 3D image. The text is from the preface of Curtis’ book The North American Indian written by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. In his text Roosevelt

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reinforces the notion of vanishing race and praises Curtis for his artistic and ‘documentary’ ventures. The projections on the walls are video loops which appear random in the selection of video clips. The source images and video clips are derived from Curtis’ film In the Land of Head Hunters, Hollywood’s films depicting ‘Indians’, and Foster’s own previously produced videos. The video clips from Curtis’ film function as a critique of Curtis’ approach to the representation of the First Nations peoples, specifically the notion of a portrayal of a ‘vanishing race’. The appropriated clips from Hollywood movies also show a stereotypical portrayal of First Nations characters in pop culture. The characters are often based on the notion of a ‘noble savage’, stoic and usually smileless, just like they are portrayed in Curtis’ staged photographs. Foster also incorporated autobiographical references by using clips from his 1993 – 94 video installation at York University titled Romantic Savage. This video work incorporated family stories and it served as a historic re-narration of Curtis’ idealized portrayal of indigenous peoples by making a comparison between Curtis’ romanticized images and the factual personal experiences. In addition to all the sources of the video clips, Foster further manipulates the video clips by creating abstract textures which dislocate the meaning and contribute to the dissolution of the binary relationship between the video and its content.

The project Re-Mediating Curtis: Remix presented in the VPAG addresses issues of contemporary means of artistic production, while also advancing the discourse of what constitutes the indigenous identity and culture. The actual physical arrangement in the gallery space, the ephemeral quality of the video work, the three channel video projection, and the participatory aspect of the exhibition also situates the work within the format of contemporary artistic practices. Foster’s extensive research, his field work gathering information, and the source video imagery highlights the cross-disciplinary aspect of his undertaking which transcends merely aesthetic concerns. Foster’s works extends past the artistic intent and incorporates working methodologies of journalism and ethnography.

Lubos Culen Curator Vernon Public Art Gallery Endnotes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_S._Curtis, accessed Sept 6, 2013 Ibid 3 http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/essay3.html, accessed September 6, 2013 Gerald Robert Vizenor is a Native American (Anishinaabe) writer and professor. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

4 http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/index.php?option=com_frontpage, accessed September 6, 2013 1 2

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Squelch, 2004, right monitor of three-channel video installation titled Playing Indian: Burn, Static and Squelch, 3mins.

stephen foster: re-mediating mediated media By steven loft

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Burn - Re-mediating Curtis: Remix, 2013, multi-channel interactive video Installation, 54secs loop.

(This video is a remix of original footage from Burn, 2004)

Stephen Foster: Remediating mediated media

“All histories have a history, and one is incomplete without the other.”… Paul Chaat-Smith 1 What does Stephen Foster mean when he sets out to “Re-mediate Curtis”? Well, the Curtis in question is photographer, filmmaker and amateur ethnologist Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952). In 1907 Curtis published the first volume of his 20 volume series; The North American Indian, and in 1914 he produced and directed In the Land of the Headhunters, a silent film fictionalizing the world of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of the Northwest coast.2 For Curtis, the “Indian” was a vanishing race. His goal was to document as much “American Indian” traditional life as possible before that way of life disappeared forever. That Curtis has become “the posterchild” for the false romanticization of Aboriginal peoples is perhaps a bit unfair.

There were certainly many others engaged in the practice, and his motives, if not his actions, attested to a real belief that he was creating important historical documents. They were however, deeply flawed, historically inaccurate documents and are indicative of a vast history of misrepresentation in various genres of media. Curtis wrote that “the information that is to be gathered ... respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost. As far as the ethnologist is concerned, this race is not only vanishing but has almost vanished. We are now working late in the afternoon of the last day.”3 What Curtis, and so many others attempted to do, was construct notions of a dying race, doomed by the inexorable march of “civilization” constraining them to a fate of nostalgia and entertainment. As Gerald Vizenor has noted, the Curtis works were ethnographic and detractive. “The modernist constructions of culture, with natives outside of rational, cosmopolitan consciousness, are realities by separation, a sense of native absence over presence in history. The absence of natives was represented by images of traditions, simulations of the other in the past; the presence of natives was tragic, the notions of savagism and the emotive images of a vanishing race.”4 However, in their recent project, entitled Edward Curtis Meets the Kwakwaka’wakw, Aaron Glass, Brad Evans and Andrea Sanborn, of Rutgers University work to change this narrative. For them, when resituated within the history of motion pictures and framed by current Kwakwaka’wakw perspectives, this landmark of early cinema can be recast as visible evidence of ongoing cultural survival and transformation under shifting historical conditions. For nearly a century and counting, In the Land of the Head Hunters has

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Hollywood 1 - Re-mediating Curtis: Remix, 2013, multi-channel interactive video installation, 1min 41secs loop.

(The video uses repurposed footage from Squelch 2004 in combination with appropriated imagery from Hollywood films in original remix.)

constituted a filmic lens through which to reframe and re-imagine the changing terms of colonial representation, cultural memory, and intercultural encounter.5 So, how do we reconcile these two distinctly different, and (for many) antagonistic views? For Stephen Foster, this is accomplished through the act of “remediation.”

In their book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Professors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that new media forms achieve cultural significance by “paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as painting, photography, film and television” in a process they call “remediation”. In stating their theory of the “double logic of remediation”, they write; • •

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Remediation as the mediation of mediation. Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation.

Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to function as media at all.

Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality. Although Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and simulacra might suggest otherwise, all mediations are themselves real. They are real as artifacts (but not as autonomous agents) in our mediated culture. Despite the fact that all media depend on other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still needs to acknowledge that all media remediate the real. Just as there is no getting rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real.

Remediation as reform. The goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media.

Furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well.6

Marshall Mcluhan writes that “our very word ‘grasp’, or ‘apprehension’ points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time… a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement”7 Stephen Foster’s “remediations” do indeed fit this description. But he situates them from a specifically Indigenous epistemology. By doing so, he introduces an antecedent cultural relativism of story-telling, irony, and Trickster-ism framing the work in a decolonial aesthetic strategy. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith argues that the term indigenizing “centres a politics of Indigenous identity and indigenous cultural action.”8 Foster’s unambiguous indigenizing politic is evident in his long-standing practice of mediating/remediating stereotypical imagery.

For Foster, this is “in a sense reinvesting it with a meaning contrary to its original intention […]In this way an historical or pop culture image of “Indians” is reinvested with a certain complexity that complicates the stereotypical image.”9

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Static - Re-mediating Curtis: Remix, 2013, multi-channel interactive video installation. 1min 41secs loop.

In his latest work, Re-mediating Curtis, as well as in previous works such as Forked Tongue (2006), Transmission 1 and 2, and Death of Empire (series), he interrogates a broader cultural assertion fostered (no pun intended) through previous media accounts of “the Native”. He repudiates the canon of “postmodernism” (a label too quickly and carelessly applied to the work of Aboriginal artists) by situating an Indigeneity that challenges pre-conceived notions. When Foster says, “I focus on the politics of ideology that develop from the historical conflicts between ideology and representation”,10 it is as a person of Haida and Metis heritage, locating himself as researcher, scholar, artist and subject.

By remediating Curtis (and through him, the wider narrative myths created about Aboriginal people), Foster effectively mediates the mediation of history, placing the colonial imagination in the realm of myth, reinscribing Indigenous systems of thought, site, object, ritual and ceremony as preeminent.

This is not simply an evacuation of ancestral artifact, but an Indigenous historicity, tied to memory and located in contemporary Aboriginal presence and lived experience. “Contextual validation makes our reality, experiences, and existence as Aboriginal peoples visible.”11 Succinct and eloquent, Foster’s remediation eschew the confrontational politics of identity for a nuanced examination of representation, and misrepresentation through Curtis (and inclusive of larger mass media portrayals), while also providing a reconsideration and recontextualization of an Indigenous historical and contemporary presence.

Foster creates an interstitial space of remembrance rooted in older media technologies (the Curtis photographs and film) explored through newer ones (video, new media, 3-d modeling and interactivity) wherein site, and object are enlivened and re-imagined within a specific Indigenous ontology. For example, by recreating parts of the community of Fort Rupert (where In the Land of the Headhunters was originally shot), Foster “rewrites” the history the film purportedly examined, acknowledging the coercive power of works such as Curtis’, while situating indegeneity as a discourse of liberation, placing it beyond the semiotic into the realm of cultural cosmology. So, if previous media imagery of Aboriginal people (the work of E.S Curtis being only one example) are mediations of the real, constructed to form a national mythology, Foster’s “mediations of the mediation” (as per Bolter and Grusin) replace and confirm an Indigenous reality, in what Edward Said termed its “global, earthly context.”12 Bolter and Grusin seem to hint at this kind of social remediation. For them, artists engaged in projects of remediation “are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense.”13 Foster’s remediations do indeed go beyond the “real’ as fashioned by colonial understandings of Indigeneity, situating Indigenous presence in the past, the present, and into the future. He mediatizes customary Indigeneity into a hyper-contemporized milieu, positing an Indigenous reality as dynamic, evolving, but rooted in its own historical consciousness.

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Foster says of his work that, it “speaks to failed attempts at Manifest Destiny in terms of a new world of electronic information and cultural reaffirmation and recapturing. Maybe we are experiencing more complicated notions of identity, history and heritage and those kinds of things that ultimately mean failure for an empire. Or maybe… colonizing strategies are co-opted by the colonized and they succeed in reversing the process.”14 For it is his remediation, through a specifically Indigenous lens, of mass media mediations of the image of “Indians” that refashions them into something new, but also old. It is an act of decolonization, and an assertion of cultural sovereignty and proprietary self determination. As Jeff Corntassel reminds us, “considering how colonization systematically deprives us of our experiences and confidence as Indigenous peoples, the linkages between colonialism, cultural harm, and the disintegration of community health and well-being become clearer.”15 Stephen Foster seeks to parse the “history of the history” behind representation of the “Indian” in media. By doing so, he exposes the fallacies of this misrepresentation and establishes the complex dynamic histories of Aboriginal peoples so often subverted, or downright erased by “official” narratives. With his remediations, Stephen Foster is disrupting the colonial archive and indigenizing historical memory. Or, to slightly revise a famous Quaker phrase from the 1950’s, he “speaks truth to history.”16 Steven Loft National Visiting Trudeau Fellow, Ryerson University Scholar-in-Residence, Ryerson Image Centre

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Endnotes Paul Chaat-Smith, Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN (2009), 53.

2 Interestingly, it is also recognized as the first feature-length film to exclusively feature Aboriginal peoples and culture.

3 Mick Gidley, Edward S Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K (1998), p. 18 and quoting article by Curtis in American Museum Journal, 1914 4 Gerald Vizenor, Edward Curtis: Pictorialist and Ethnographic Adventurist on website Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian, Northwestern University Library (2007), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/essay3.html accessed October, 2013.

5 http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/index.php accessed September, 2013.

“Even more noteworthy than Curtis’s embellishments, though, is the film’s portrayal of actual Kwakwaka’wakw ritu als that were prohibited in Canada at the time of filming under the federal Potlatch Prohibition (1884-1951), in tended to hasten the assimilation of First Nations. Despite this legislation, the dances and visual art forms—hered itary property of specific families—were maintained through this period and transmitted to subsequent generations, including the performers associated with this project. An extension of their previous engagement with international expositions, ethnographers, and museums, the film in part helped the Kwakwaka’wakw evade the potlatch ban, maintain their expressive culture, and emerge as actors on the world’s stage. By adapting their traditional ceremo nies for Curtis’s film while refusing to play stereotypical “Indians,” the Kwakwaka’wakw played a vital role in the de velopment of the most modern of commercial art forms—the motion picture.”

6 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (2000), 55, 56.

7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, N.Y (1964), reprinted by Signet Classics (1972), p67.

8 Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, Zed, London (1999),146.

9 Anna Hudson, as quoted in A conversation with Stephen Foster, James Gillespie, and Janet Jones, in Remediations: Stephen Foster and James Gillespie, Janet Jones, editor, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton (2007), 32.

10 Ibid, as quoted by Janet Jones in Introduction, 5.

11 Kathy Absolon and Cam Willett, Putting Ourselves Forward: Location in Aboriginal Research in Research as Resistance, Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, ed’s., Canadian Scholars Press, Toronto (2005), 117.

12 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Random House, Toronto (1993), 6.

13 Bolter and Grusin, 53.

14 Jones, 35.

15 Jeff Corntassel, in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, 88.

16 I refer here to the phrase “speak truth to power”, which originated in a 1955 pamphlet produced by the Quakers.

It promoted a pacifist alternative to the struggle against totalitarianism, and has since become a common phrase in political activism, meaning “speaking out to those in authority.”

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Hollywood 1 - Re-mediating Curtis: Remix, 2013, multi-channel interactive video installation, 1min 41secs loop.

(The video uses repurposed footage from Squelch 2004 in combination with appropriated imagery from Hollywood films in original remix.)

re-mediating curtis: remix by stephen foster

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Vanishing Race, 2013, Inkjet print for backlit light box, 48 X 60 in. Exhibited at Kelowna Art Gallery in 2013 in the exhibition Re-mediating Curtis: Toy Portraits.

Re-mediating Curtis: Remix Introduction

Edward Sheriff Curtis is a well-known photographer and ethnographer and while his work has come under tremendous critique over the years, his images have had a significant impact on the representation of indigenous culture both in anthropology and in popular culture. It is the latter that I find compelling especially as it relates to popular images of indigeneity in contemporary film and media. Curtis’ work at the beginning of the 20th century set the tone for popular representations of ‘Indians’ throughout popular culture impacting movies, cartoon, television and toys and tourist memorabilia. His images grew out of an ideal notion of a romantic savage that permeated the ethos of a late 19th century Victorian aesthetic. His photographic and film work emerges at a moment in history when photography as an art form is striving for legitimacy while simultaneously ensuring its stature as a scientific tool for documenting truth. It is no surprise that Curtis’ work bridges both science and fine art and blurs the lines between fiction and documentary. In part his mixed approach and indelible skill have imbued his images with a particular longevity making them compelling to contemporary audiences. His romantic idealism still resonates with contemporary popular culture and captivates us with a guilt-ridden nostalgia for an indigenous people locked in an imagined past.

In Re-mediating Curtis: Remix I wanted to focus on Curtis’ construction of an imagined village as a set for his famous film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914). The multi-channel video installation presented in this exhibition combines images from Curtis’ original film built into short interactive loops controlled by audience motion as well as 3D animated recreation of the Curtis’ film set from Deer Island. The installation also contains original video and sound made in response to Curtis’ film and photographic images.

I first came into contact with Curtis’ photographs as a teenager. I was exploring my own family roots when I came across a book containing his images of peoples from Vancouver Island and elsewhere on the Northwest Coast. At first I was not aware of the critique of his work and that his images were heavily manipulated creating false impressions of indigenous culture and its people. However, I did respond positively, for the most part, to his romantic portrayal of ‘Indians’. I felt at that time they offered a more compelling image of ‘Indianness’, which differed from the one I saw in local media or the savagery presented in Hollywood films.

His images were that of a noble people at one with their natural environment, a sentiment often echoed by contemporary eco-theorists. The images had just enough specific cultural detail to distinguish Northwest Coast people from the typical iconic image of a ‘Plains Indian’, which at the time was the dominant image presented throughout popular culture and still is today.

As I became more familiar with Curtis’ images I also became aware of the critique surrounding his work and the level of photographic, staging and prop manipulation he utilized in creation of his photography and filmmaking. Curtis would often color the skin of his subjects to make them appear darker as well as wear wigs and use prop and regalia in a mixed and ad hoc fashion. Specifically troubling for the people

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Hollywood 1 - Re-mediating Curtis: Remix, 2013, multi-channel interactive video installation, 1min 41secs loop.

(The video uses repurposed footage from Squelch 2004 in combination with appropriated imagery from Hollywood films in original remix.)

documented on the Northwest Coast was his insistence on dressing individuals in costumes predating European contact. When presented as actual documentation instead of historical reenactment his work had the effect of freezing a culture in the past and misrepresenting or even ignoring contemporary culture. By doing this Curtis’ work created an imagined past for indigenous cultures constructed from his own sense of longing for an idealized primitive and innocent human past. In addition, the authority of his images not just as art but science had the added effect of invalidating contemporary indigenous culture as something less than authentic and somehow polluted. With this in mind, I find Curtis’ film especially compelling because not only does he recreate an entire village devoid of evidence for a contemporary culture but he also develops an entire storyline that is completely fictionalized and bares little connection to traditional stories.

The film is a complete imagining of an indigenous Northwest Coast island community. Having said that, it does contain images of masks, components of dances and music that is significantly reflects elements of Kwakwaka’wakw. More importantly it also reflects a community of real individuals that participated in making the film, leaving a legacy of their image and elements of their traditional knowledge for their children and grandchildren. This is important because while Curtis was striving for an authentic representation of ‘Indianness’, the indigenous people participating in the film were keenly aware that they were creating a historical reenactment based on their knowledge.

Background Research for the Project

While In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) has been referenced and discussed in both anthropology and contemporary art discourses, little work has been done focusing on the temporary village constructed on Deer Island (part of the traditional territory of the Fort Rupert Indian Band). Situating the film is important as it reveals its connection to place and community contextualizing its significance on both a local level and as a mass media cultural phenomenon. The installation Re-mediating Curtis: Remix is a critique and reflection on the film and its influence on popular images of ‘Indianness’. In the Land of the Headhunters is an iconic film that has become a major source for visual imagery of West coast peoples. It has inundated pop culture in various forms including major motion pictures (The Doors, 1991) as well being a centerpiece for museums focused on Northwest coast cultures. In the Royal British Columbia Museum, there is a significant presentation of Curtis’ work in relation to Northwest coast culture as part of the First Peoples Gallery. The Gallery presents segments of Curtis’ film as well as large-scale versions of his portraiture. As a person of Northwest coast heritage and an individual who grew up on Vancouver Island, I have always found the exhibit problematic as it does not acknowledge or reflect on Curtis’ film and his images as being largely a romanticized and imaginary construction. Lippard has described Curtis’ aesthetic as the soft lens of a romantic and “emotional formalism” (1992:25). Curtis often sought to erase evidence of European influence on his subjects and often depicted them in traditional clothing and in circumstances out of date with their contemporary lives. In The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (1982), Lyman illustrates how Curtis staged and manipulated his photographs to eliminate any traces of Aboriginal contact with white culture all in order to portray a supposedly more “authentic” representation of “Indianness” (Lyman 182:149). “Curtis’s most popular images were part of the pictoralist tradition.

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Squelch, 2004, right monitor of three-channel video installation titled Playing Indian: Burn, Static and Squelch, 3mins.

The pictoralist style is characterized by the manipulation of light, line, and composition in ways, which frame the image being photographed in a romanticized form” (Francis 2002:11). It is this style and general aesthetic approach, composing his images and manipulating his subject matter that gives issue to his images as ethnography and as authentic representations of indigenous peoples and their culture. Yet, at the same time it is this aesthetic approach that is responsible for his popularity and his longevity. Curtis’ impact on mainstream popular film is directly evident in his work as a consultant on early Hollywood films specifically on Cecile B. DeMille’s landmark western The Plainsman (1936), with Gary Cooper and a young Anthony Quinn as a Cheyenne warrior; this film had a tremendous impact on the shape of Hollywood depictions of indigenous peoples. The Plainsman successfully revived the cowboy-and-Indian formula, which for several years became the staple for Hollywood Westerns (Aleiss 2005: 59). Using his past experience and connections Curtis shot both stills and film footage for DeMille’s iconic film. This film footage was used as research for the costumes and depictions of Native people in the film. Curtis’ influence on pop culture representations of ‘Indianness’ cannot be understated. His work on The Plainsman helps establish a mold for western films to come and his exquisite photographs for the The North American Indian project have been reprinted and have been a source of inspiration for many films, public statues and toys including the recent Disney film The Lone Ranger (2013) starring Johnny Depp as Tonto. However multiple and complex Curtis’ objectives in making In the Land of the Headhunters were, it is clear that the project has a place in the development of the so-called “salvage ethnography” at the turn of the 20th century Boazian tradition in American anthropology (see Evans 1998; Russell 1999a, 1999b). Indeed Wakeham (2006) argues that both the 1914 and 1973 versions of the film fetishize the recovery narrative that typifies salvage ethnography, but that the 1973 re-cut of the film renders it more documentary in form and tone than original, and indeed implicitly remakes a claim to ethnographic authenticity as a result. A more recent project, entitled Edward Curtis Meets the Kwakwaka’wakw (Evans et. al nd) attempts to re-contextualize the film and its production, recognizing the (melo)drama of the original, and arguing for recognition of a collaborative process between Curtis and Kwakwaka’wakw interlocutors in the development of the work. This more nuanced view of In the Land of the Head Hunters (and not coincidentally its reconstructions) have for nearly a century and counting, has offered a filmic lens through which to reframe and re-imagine the changing terms of colonial representation, cultural memory, and intercultural encounter (nd. 3). The overt inclusion of Kwakwaka’wakw stakeholders in this latest remaking of the film renders it a kind of once and future ethnography. As insightful as this approach is, however, there is an ongoing ethnographic conceit engaged here; the film was and is primarily a Kwakwaka’wakw entity. While on one hand this is self-evident and historically accurate, it ignores the much wider impact of the film and others like it as representations of Aboriginality providing images that reached far beyond the ethnographic confines. It is here, in this installation, that art and ethnography meet, through an aesthetic and critical reflection on the refraction of the Curtis/ Kwakwaka’wakw legacy in the popular culture of both indigenous and settlers societies.

Recent feature film productions such as Avatar (2009) and its obvious use of typical Hollywood tropes of indigenous representation prove that Curtis’ legacy still has profound effect: “It, (Avatar) shows stereotype after stereotype about indigenous peoples in mainstream culture and makes reference to representations in other Hollywood blockbusters; to mention a few: the messianic destiny of the white soldier destined to

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Romantic Savage, 1994, single channel video installation, 15mins loop. (The video introduces a multi-layered narrative voiceover remixing and reconfiguring appropriated imagery from In the Land of the Headhunters by E.S. Curtis, 1914.)

be the best Indian, a reference, as many have pointed out to Dances With Wolves” (Alberola 2010:1) The romantic envisioning of indigenous peoples in Avatar can be seen as an extension of Curtis’ pictorialist aesthetic. Cultural sensitivity is important when working with this material given the issues surrounding Curtis’ film and its history. The embedded and largely unintentional irony of Curtis’ work has a complex dynamic with contemporary communities and individuals as already stated. It is important to acknowledge that relationship in the process of artistic production to ensure that cultural imagery is presented with respect to the original people represented in Curtis’ film as well as their descendants. This dynamic also impacts the contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw communities and permission and consultation will be part of this artistic process. Photo essays and academic papers documenting the process of research and production will provide context for the artistic work within contemporary academic discourses. This project functions in multiple ways to engage issues of representation in an interdisciplinary context while capturing the more subtle and complex relations between Curtis’ work and contemporary communities. By working in an interdisciplinary manner, which includes both artistic practice based research and a hybrid social science model of community participation, we hope to broaden our research impact while enhancing the depth of experience embodied through the artwork. This project will be a self-reflective analysis on the complexities of media representation and its historical origins as much as it will provide a compelling critique of ethnography in a new millennium.

Remixing Indigeneity in E. S. Curtis

The Re-mediating Curtis Project is a multi-phase project with a series of exhibitions reflecting specifically on the role Curtis’ work has played in popular culture and the impact it has had on the representation of indigenous people. The ongoing project will eventually include a larger discussion of contemporary work by contemporary indigenous artists in addition to my own as well the development of a community-based research component. The first exhibition in this body of work took place at the Kelowna Art Gallery with the exhibition Re-mediating Curtis: Toy Portraits closely followed by the Vernon Public Art Gallery exhibition ReMediating Curtis: Remix. It is my hope in the near future to expand the project to incorporate other forms of inquiry including working in part with the community members of Fort Rupert who are currently engaged in legacy projects through the U’Mista Cultural centre. It is important to understand and reflect on how Curtis’ legacy informs contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw culture and the role the current legacy projects have played in contemporary identity formation.

The current Re-mediating Curtis: Remix is a multi-media installation consisting of an interactive environment based on Curtis’ photographs, popular images of ‘Indianness’ and a reconstructed set from Curtis’ film. The imagery is composited together using animation and digital video then projected on to multiple screens alternating with other original visual material developed for the installation. An interactive interface has been designed based on motion detection using Max MSP/Jitter authoring software. The viewer/audience members can move freely in and around the projections allowing them to access differing content directly by their movement through the space. The main source of imagery is based on Curtis’ film set (modeled

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Re-mediating Curtis: Remix (central video projection), 2013, multi-channel interactive video Installation, 3mins loop.

(Video image is a 3D model of the central film set constructed on Deer Island for the film In the Land of the Headhunters, 1914.)

using 3D animation software) as it was constructed on Deer Island during filming of In the Land of the Headhunters. The animation of the set is also displayed in anaglyph 3D as a reference to more contemporary cinematic media. The recreation of the set virtually is meant to reveal the idealized artificial imagining of romantic indigenous past, which was at the heart Curtis’ film project. Video and audio is presented as overlapping modular components that can be played back in differing sequences based on audience movement. The overall effect is a rich and complex sound and videoscape. The overlapping motion-activated sound and video elements inform and enhance each other creating irony while complicating notions of media manufactured ‘Indianness’ and stereotypes. As the viewers move through the space they create, through simultaneous activation, their own critique of ‘Indianness’ and of Curtis’ legacy by the activation of different elements at different times. As the project continues to develop in subsequent installations additions and new variations will be developed so that no two installations are the same. This will, in a sense, create a living project, which is transformed with each new installation creating an iterative process in different spaces and contexts.

As an artist of Northwest coast heritage I have felt the impact of Curtis’ work in my own personal identity formation. The romantic imagery created a false impression in the understanding of my own heritage.

However, it also gave me insights and was oddly a source of inspiration for many years as it presented an alternative, although noble, image of ‘Indianness’ as opposed to a typically derogatory image of First Nations people and culture, which was predominant in popular media during my youth. The Re-mediating Curtis Project is in many ways is a culmination of my artistic critique of media and the influence of early ethnography of contemporary popular culture. Over the course of my career my work for the most part has engaged with a discourse around the politics of representation. Throughout my artistic practice I have referenced Curtis directly though a process of re-appropriation critiquing anthropology and ethnography as well as contemporary culture. My MFA thesis exhibition and support paper entitled Behind a Sheet of Glass (1994) included work dedicated to a critique of Curtis (Romantic Savage, 1993). Romantic Savage was a single channel video installation that featured three alternating stories as voiceovers for a re-cut version of the In the Land of the Head Hunters. Two of the stories related to personal family stories, but one was presented in a romantic and idealize manner, while the other was delivered as if a lecture. Both stories are intertwined and overlap with the narration of Donald Sutherland from a documentary on E. S. Curtis.

I also used Curtis’ footage from In the Land of the Headhunters and text excerpts from The North American Indian in the multi-channel video installation Offcentre (1995). In Offcentre I reproduced a short section of the story’s hero dancing around a fire on a vision quest. The segment was superimposed multiple times over itself. Each time when a new figure is superimposed over another, it degrades the previous image slightly.

This process is known as rescanning, which is done by reshooting the image from a TV monitor then playing back the combined image then reshooting again and then combining that. The progressively degraded multiple images become symbolic in nature representing both the pervasive influence of Curtis’ work and the representative of the distorted image of indigeniety his images created, echoing down through time as it were. The secondary image of this video installation involved a similar rescanning process but the subject

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of the image was that of myself running up a set of stairs continually. The main focus of the video work was to connect the scientific work of Curtis and other early ethnographers and anthropologists to a form of dehumanization that can be used to justify racism and violence. We have too often seen bad science and the distortion of scientific inquiry used in just everything from residential schools to police brutality to open street violence.

In more recent work I have implied the legacy of Curtis’ imagery through more subtle means recreating poses and gestures reminiscent of his portraits such as in my photo-triptych Landclaim (2007). In this series of three self-portrait digital photo tableaus I recreate the poses from Curtis’ portraits and use a direct camera angle similar to Curtis’. I eliminated backgrounds substituting digital backdrops in order to minimize any allusion to naturalism creating an overall synthetic effect. I also referenced Curtis’ portraiture in an earlier multi-channel video installation entitled Curios and Other Trinkets (2000). However, in this particular work the focus is on the relationship between tourism in the form of postcards, including postcards showing Curtis portraits, and state sponsored violence against indigenous peoples, with specific reference to the Oka Crisis.

It has always seemed ironic to me how Canada nationally promotes indigenous culture and appropriates its images and artifacts for international events as well as promoting tourism in general, while simultaneously ignoring its responsibility. Curios and Other Trinkets attempts to reveal the complexities of the historical relationship between Canada with its Para-Military organization, the RCMP, and indigenous people. I also explored this theme in my video installation Villains and Heroes (1993). Both video installations and the subsequent single channel versions feature references to the Oka crisis and the standoff between the Canadian Armed Forces and Mohawk warriors. Other contemporary indigenous artists such as Jeff Thomas, Marie Clements, Kent Monkman, Brian Jungen, Shelly Niro, James Luna and KC Adams, to name a few, have worked with the legacy of Curtis and other early ethnographers as well as myself. I feel this growing body of art and art criticism is a testament to the impact Curtis’ work has made on the collective consciousness of mainstream society and demonstrates the influence his work has on the continued stereotyping and oppression of indigenous culture and people. While representations of indigenous identity have a complex dynamic that at times is highly problematic the Re-mediating Curtis Project seeks to not only represent their complexity but also provide an opportunity for a multi-vocal expression of Indigenous identity that includes an Indigenous perspective as well as revealing the ideological and historical underpinnings behind contemporary representation of indigeneity.

Stephen Foster Indigenous Media Artist Associate Professor at University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus

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References Alberola, Dolores Miralles. (2010). Avatar: A Tale of Indigenous Survival? (Conference Paper) Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction, Mansfield College, Oxford, UK, 11-13 of July 2010.

Aleiss, Angela. (2005). Making the Whiteman’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies.

Praeger Pub. Westport CT, 2005.

Evans, B., Glass, A. & Sanborn, A. (2008). Edward Curtis Meets the Kwakwaka’wakw: In the Land of the Head Hunters.

Accessed at http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/ Feb 9, 2011).

Foster, Stephen, dir. Curios and Other Trinkets. V-tape, 2000.

Foster, Stephen, dir. Romantic Savage. V-tape, 1994.

Foster, Stephen, dir. Offcentre. V-tape, 1995.

Foster, Stephen. Landclaim. 2007. 36” X 60” Triptych Ultrachrome Inkjet print on Aluminum Dibond Francis, Margot. (2002). Reading the Autoethnographic Perspectives of Indians “Shooting Indians. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Number 7: Spring 2002.

Lippard, Lucy. ed. 1992. Partial recall: With essays on photographs of Native North Americans.

New York: New York Press.

Lyman, Christopher. (1982). The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of lndians by Edward Curtis.

New York: Pantheon Books in association with the Smithsonian Institution Press.

Russell, Catherine. (1999). Experimental Ethnography: the Work of Film in the Age of Video.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Russell, Catherine. (1996): Playing Primitive: In the Land of the Head Hunters and/or War Canoes.

Visual Anthropology 8, 55–77.

Russell, Catherine. (1999). Experimental Ethnography: the Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press. Aaron Glass, Brad Evans, and Andrea Sanborn (Executive Producers)

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Romantic Savage, 1994, single channel video installation, 15mins loop. (The video introduces a multi-layered narrative voiceover remixing and reconfiguring appropriated imagery from In the Land of the Headhunters by E.S. Curtis, 1914.)

Stephen Foster

Curriculum Vitae

Artistic Productions (video and new media, selected):

2010

2009

2009

2009

2009 2006 2006 2006

“Raven Brings the Light.” Two channel Video and Sound Installation. 4:00 mins.

Continous Loop.

“Prince George Métis Elders’ Documentary Project.” Interactive DVD 6:00:00hrs.

“Kiss and Tell.” Interactive flash Website. http://www.chambreblanche.qc.ca/documents/stephenfoster/ “The Métis of British Columbia: Culture, History, and the Contemporary Community.” Interactive DVD. 6:00:00hrs.

“The Métis of British Columbia: Music and Dance.” Interactive DVD. 45:00mins.

“Forked Tongue.” Single channel video installation. 2:32mins “Gunfight.” Two Channel Video Installation. 32secs. Continuous Loop.

“Transmission 2.” Audio Installation for Surround Sound.

Exhibitions and Screenings (selected):

2012

2012 2011 2011 2010 2010 2010

2009 2009 2009 2009

2008

2007 2007 2007

Group Exhibition. Native Moving Images: Curator Antonie Frank Gallery: Konstnärshuset/SKF, Stockholm, Sweden Solo Exhibition. “Raven Brings the Light.” Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, MB Group Exhibition. “Ethnographic Terminalia 2011.” Eastern Bloc Centre for New Media and Interdisciplinary Art, Montreal, QC Group Exhibition. “Resilience/Resistance: Metis Art 1880-2011.” Batoché National Historic Site Exhibition Centre, Batoché, SK Group Exhibition. “Indigenous New Media.” ImagineNative Film and Media Arts, Festival, Toronto, ON Group Exhibition. “Woodhaven Project.” Woodhaven Conservncy, Kelowna, BC Solo Exhibition. “Prince George Métis Elders’ Documentary Project.” Old Fire Hall, Yukon Centre for the Arts Whitehorse, YT Solo Exhibition. Kiss and Tell (Web Art Site Launch). Venue: La Chambre Blanche Group Exhibition. “Ethnographic Terminalia 2009.” Crane Arts LLC, Philadelphia, PA Group Exhibition. “Le Folauga - The Past Coming Forward: Contemporary Pacific Art.” Kaohisiung Museum and Art Gallery, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan Group Exhibition. “New Media Works.” ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, ON Two-Person Exhibition. “Remediations.” Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba Touring (Kelowna, Hamilton, Sudbury and Brandon.)

Retrospective Screening. Yukon International Short Film Festival, Dawson City, YT Group Screening “Occidental Artist” at NurtureArt Gallery Brooklyn, NY Solo Exhibition “Crossfire.” MIC Toi Rerehiko Auckland, NZ

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2007 2007 2007 2006 2006

Two-Person Exhibition. “Making Space/Sharing Place” Gallery 101, Ottawa, ON Solo Exhibition. “Claim.” Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, MB Group Screening. “Red Eye.” Art Gallery of Calgary – Touring (Ottawa, Calgary, and Corner Brook, NL) Solo Exhibition. “Playing Indian: Burn, Static and Squelch.” VMAC Gallery, Toronto, ON Group Screening. Transmediale Interantional Media Arts Festival, Program: ImagineNative, Berlin, Germany

Artist Talks, Presentations and Conferences:

2012 2012 2012 2011 2009 2009 2009 2008

2008 2007 2007 2007 2007 2007 2007

Presentation. Indigenous Collaborations. Re:works in Progress Symposium and Art. Incubator. Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, ON Artist Talk. Stephen Foster. Re:works in Progress Symposium and Art Incubator. Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, ON Artist Talk. Stephen Foster. Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, MB Artist Talk. Stephen Foster. Batoché National Historic Site Exhibition Centre, Batoché, SK Artist Talk. “New Media Works.” ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, ON Artist Talk. Kiss and Tell: Graffiti and Monumentality. La Chambre Blanche, Quebec City, QC Presentation. Stephen Foster, Mike Evans. New Video and Old Concerns: Contemporary Representational Strategies in the Context of Participatory Video and Interactive DVD Technologies. Society for Applied Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico Presentation. Stephen Foster, Mike Evans, Jon Corbett, Joanne Gervais, Raquel Mann “Prince George Métis Documentary Project: Interactive Narratives and the Multiplicity of Authorship” presented at Sharing Authority: Building Community-University Alliances through Oral History, Digital Storytelling and Collaboration, Montreal QC, February 2008 Presentation. Stephen Foster and Mike Evans. “Self-Representation in Process and Product: Some Considerations from the use of interactive DVD technologies” presented at Sharing Authority: Building Community-University Alliances through Oral History, Digital Storytelling and Collaboration, Montreal QC, February 2008 Presentation Stephen Foster and Mike Evans. “Prince George Métis Documentary Project: An Exploration in Experimental and Interactive Documentary” presented at Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, Wilfrid Laurier, Waterloo, ON, May 2007 Presentation. Stephen Foster and Mike Evans. Prince George Métis Documentary Project: An Exploration of New Media Technology in Participatory Research”, Visible Evidence XIV, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, December 2007 Lecture. Stephen Foster and Mike Evans. Digital Representation and The Construction of Community: The Case of the Island Cache. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, August 2007 Lecture. “Prince George Métis Documentary Project: An Exploration in Experimental and Interactive Documentary” Invited presentation to Centre Du Documentaire, Concordia University, Montreal QC, March 2007 Artist Talk. Dawson City International Short Film Festival. April 2007 Artist Talk. MIC Toi Rerehiko Auckland, NZ. August 2007

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Publications (authored):

(R) Foster, Stephen and Mike Evans. 'Prince George Métis Elder’s Documentary Project: Matching Product

With Process In New Forms Of Documentary’. Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an

International Context. Ed. Wendy Pearson and Susan Knabe. Waterloo, Ontario: University of

Waterloo Press, 2011 (R) Evans, Mike and Stephen Foster. ‘A Case of Geocide: The Political and Cartographic Erasure

of the Island Cache’. Shima: International Journal of Research into Island Culture. 4.2 (2010): 88 - 97.

(R) Evans, Mike, Stephen Foster, Jon Corbett, Erin Dolmage, Joanne Gervais, Raquel Mann, and Zachary Romano. “Representation in Participatory Video: Some Considerations from Research with Métis”

Journal of Canadian Studies. 43.1 (2009): Pg 87-108.

Foster, Stephen. “European Fantasy: Shifting Images of Indianness.” Culture Shock.

V-Tape, Toronto 2008: Pg. 16 – 23.

Bibliography of Articles and Reviews:

Claxton, Dana. “Re: Wind.” Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture. Walter Philips Gallery, Banff 2005: Pg. 28.

Claxton, Dana. “Back/Flash.” Conundrum: Art for The Seventh Generation.

Winter 2003: Pg.1 Gagnon, Monika Kin. Duels, Dualities, and Intertextuality in the Media Works of Stephen Foster. (Catalog Essay). MIC Toi Rerehiko, Auckland, NZ 2007.

Gagnon, Monika Kin. “Remix! Artist Remake The Media.” Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film 2005 4th Annual. Durham Art Gallery. 2005. <http://www.durhamart.on.ca/film/remix.html> Gillespie, James. “Rewind: Language and Intercession.” Canadian Art Magazine.

Spring 2005 Vol. 22 No. 2: pg. 98.

LaVallee, Michelle. Making Space, Sharing Place (Catalog Essay). Gallery 101, Ottawa, Canada 2007.

Missen, James. “Asserting The Right to Sovereignty, Audio-Visually. Fuse Magazine Vol. 31 Number 1 January 2008.

Priegert, Portia.” Stephen Foster and James Gillespie” Border Crossings. Issue No.102.

May, 2007.

Sandals, Leah. “Cowboys and Media Mavens.” National Post (Full page highlight of Exhibition Remediations) Vol. 9 Number 88 Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007.

Villeneuve, Joanne F. “Exhibit Sheds New Light on Point of View.” Brandon Sun. Wednesday, April 30, 2008.

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vernon public art gallery vernon, British columbia canada www.vernonpublicartgallery.com