Gathering of Nations by Nadya Kwandibens at The New Gallery

Calgary’s own Terrance Houle didn’t think his calendar was busy enough this summer — even though he has six exhibitions, from Vancouver’s Western Front to Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre — so he took an additional job curating an exhibition at The New Gallery, showcasing several aboriginal artists from across the country.

“When the gallery approached me to curate the space, I knew exactly who I wanted,” says Houle. “I was interested in the way they lived their lives nomadically.”

Intrigued by the open movement of First Nations peoples across the terrain, the porous pre-border landscape of the prairies and the migratory paths from rural to urban, and back again, Houle assembled artists whose work documents and explores not only states of transience, but the translation of identity through shifting environs.

Nadya Kwandibens’s photographs provide a document of contemporary aboriginals and playfully reference stereotyped images of native peoples. The series Concrete Indians is derived from a name her father used to describe a younger generation of aboriginals who left the reserve for the excitement of the city. In one photograph, a barefoot woman wearing a traditional garment stands at the intersection of one of Canada’s busiest inner-city hubs: Dundas Square in Toronto. The IPod, and Blackberry-savvy urbanites pass by the woman without the slightest notice. In another photo, a young girl in a sea of native dancers dressed in colourful regalia, stares back at the camera, catching the photographer’s voyeuristic lens. In a third, a young man “scouts” the camera in mock duty, carefully adjusting his feathered headdress.

“I wanted to ask the question: Does living in the city strengthen or weaken your identity as a person of aboriginal descent?” says Kwandibens. Her photographic essays purport to deal with the trajectory of both displacement and reclamation, while documenting the contemporary native experience.

Duane Linklater’s hilarious and poignant Rezdogs charts a recognizable camcorder path from Calgary’s 17th Ave. S.W., to the wide open skies of rural Alberta, and from the innercity to the Blood Reserve. Along for the ride is Patchy, a small white-and-brown dog of various breeds, who also makes an appearance in two photographic works by Linklater in the gallery’s front window.

Between trips to Calgary’s Pet Mart and the Urban Dog Market, Patchy stops to peruse and sniff the latest dog-collar fashion, and even a game of dog monopoly. The off-camera voice of the store attendant discusses flavourful treats, from turkey and ostrich to buffalo, and gleefully identifies her clientele: “People who go to Starbucks and get coffee, come here to get their dog’s cookies.”

Patchy then finds himself on the reservation with a handful of other animals, including a bull, which stamps at the camera as though it were ready to charge. The disparity between the affluent city dog and the wild dog are stark. “I used the dog as an empathetic creature, as an entry-point into a conversation that works first for native peoples, but also to have an entry point for everyone,” says Linklater. He says he couldn’t bear to see the dog try on a ridiculous pink jumpsuit in the pet store, so he re-created Patchy in papier mâché, and photographed the sculpture sporting the dog outfit.

Artist Larry Blackhorse Lowe’s short film installation, entitled June, follows an engaging little girl — June Lowe — as she learns her Navajo heritage, and makes a teepee shape out of simple white string with her grandmother. June is the only person in the exhibition who seems utterly at home in front of the camera. She stands at the blackboard and writes “Nizhi = June,” then pronounces the language her elders likely never learned in a classroom (Dine`), and recites what seems to be a prayer, or a game, with the help of the symbolic objects she assembles on the grade-school table. The prosaic activities that occur as she assists her family in setting the table, or climbing a tree, take on a monumental quietude.

In Transforming Motion, each artist seeks to transform a fixed position whether it is their Native heritage as it is constituted in both the city and the reserve, or to develop a forward trajectory that continues to investigate how place and the spaces in between strengthen or weaken one’s identity.