Vestige

Description

In Vestige, an archival image of a Secwepémc woman on a horse contrasts the multitude of brass equine monuments of men that often reference colonial history. The image was found by the artist as a postcard with the text “Shuswap Native” on the front at the University of British Columbia’s special collections library and then encountered again in a family archive. Learning about the ancestor in this image—which in her family archive carries the inscription “Sophie Paul- died in mid 30s, the sister of tskwayásxn, Neskonlith Reserve”—brought into question the value and meaning of this photograph when found in two such different contexts. Etched onto garnet sandpaper, the materiality of the image references the challenges, abrasiveness, and discomfort of approaching a colonial archive. That sandpaper is a cheap and disposable material also speaks to ideas of value and leads to questions: Which images are deemed important? And which ones are discarded? By propelling this image from a small ethnographic postcard into a monumental size, Willard reorients it and imbues it with agency to show an important vestige of the original image: that moment on the land as an empowered Indigenous ancestor.

Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation and settler heritage, is an artist, curator and assistant professor her ongoing collaborative project BUSH gallery, is a land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges in her home territories of Secwepemcúl̓ecw.