Touching Earth Bodies offers a dialogue between three bodies of collaborative and individually produced work by Victoria-based artists Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde and Valerie Salez. The three projects, In Defiance (Delaronde), In the Shadow of our own Dust (Salez), and Touching Earth Bodies (Delaronde and Salez), explore the power of self-representation, rejuvenation, and healing through ceremony and connections to the land. The central focus of the exhibition and the referent for the overall title, Touching Earth Bodies, addresses interrelationships between the human body and the land, while considering the history and ongoing practices of deforestation across Vancouver Island’s rainforest and the resulting environmental and social impact. These works additionally confront issues around representations of women’s bodies and sexuality in art and popular culture within the current social and political climate.

Touching Earth Bodies

MAY 18-JUNE 29, 2018
COMOX VALLEY ART GALLERY, COURTENAY, BC

ARTISTS: LINDSAY KATSITSAKATSTE DELARONDE AND VALERIE SALEZ;
GUEST CURATOR: TOBY LAWRENCE 

Touching Earth Bodies is photographic series produced through an ongoing collaboration that seeks to engage one’s body with the land, simultaneously addressing contemporary environmental and social/political issues with ancient teachings and understandings of Mother Earth. The intention of Touching Earth Bodies is to explore the body’s connection and/or disconnection to land. Through the process of public calls, the artists invite participants to bravely engage their bodies, minds, and spirits in different landscapes. Ceremonial circles, mindfulness practices, and social/political discussions prepare participants to be able to fully immerse themselves into often physically, and emotionally, charged environments. The images projected at CVAG are the results of a three-day creative workshop in August 2017 in T’Sou-ke and Pacheedaht territories on southern Vancouver Island. This workshop and photographic series focused on the Islands’ rainforests and the ongoing deforestation practices and impacts. The group also focused on the similarities of trauma to the land and to women’s bodies.

Touching Earth Bodies
Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde and Valerie Salez, digital photographs, 2018

The sexualization and exploitation in the images of women in mainstream society disregard the rich cultural existence that Indigenous women have maintained through traditional knowledge, social roles, and power. This objectification of women demonstrates that in Western society there is a lack of understanding of, and relationships to, traditional teachings. It is time to push the continuum of these teachings forward to expose vulnerability, to celebrate sensuality and to reclaim eroticism through the matriarchal body. To this end, I originally conceived of “Squaw,” a series of photographs of Indigenous women in response to the derogatory usage of the word. Each woman was invited to stage a portrait reclaiming her natural sovereign powers of eroticism, sensuality, and vulnerability. Together, these women deconstruct and challenge mainstream ideas around sexuality. Their photographs dismantle negative stereotypes of First Nations women and portray more authentic truths of diversity, power and respect, through this project, each woman has found voice and a safe platform to stand In Defiance through the expression of her most private and sensual aspects.

In Defiance
Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde, digital C-prints, 2016

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bone of a story.” – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

The installation, In the Shadow of our own Dust, represents an interest in burnt wood conjuring a personal, political, global feeling about things coming apart at the seams; things being burnt down to their essence. Like a field burnt to become fallow again, new potential is revealed. This work is about the basics of death and rebirth and plays with perceptions of dark/light and life/death, where the end of something signals the beginning of something else.

In the Shadow of our own Dust
Valerie Salez, installation, burnt wood, textiles, feathers, fur, horse hair, bone, performance, 2012(2018)

This exhibition was developed out of the ongoing dialogue between guest curator Toby Lawrence and Angela Somerset, curator at Comox Valley Art Gallery, focused on collaborative creative practices, and supported by: 

THE TOUCHING EARTH BODIES SERIES WAS PRODUCED THROUGH DELARONDE’S APPOINTMENT AS THE CITY OF VICTORIA INDIGENOUS ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, 2017 AND 2018. IN DEFIANCE WAS ORIGINALLY ORGANIZED BY AND PRESENTED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA LEGACY ART GALLERIES, OCTOBER 8, 2016 – JANUARY 7, 2017.

Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde and Valerie Salez, Touching Earth Bodies, digital photo, 2018. Image courtesy of the artists.