Bodies in Conflict

The VAC is excited to announce our upcoming winter main gallery exhibition, Bodies in Conflict. The exhibition brings together three artistic practices that examine histories of bodily traumas associated with different ingestible substances. Through large-scale installations and video, artists will create several new site-specific installations that critically detail the historical and ongoing subjugation of historically-oppressed communities through their relationship to specific in/organic consumed materials.  

Kiyan Williams’s sculptures further the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual exploration of Blackness, ecology, and trans/gressive subjectivity; wherein bodies are not fixed but in process of becoming, in states of ruination, oscillate in legibility, and blur the boundaries between self and other forms of sentient life. The artist meditates on the body as an assemblage and entanglement of many forms of matter—plant life, earth, light—enduring, transforming, decaying, and regenerating amidst social and environmental shifts. 

Julia Rose Sutherland is excited to continue and develop on her ongoing Npuinu (ên·pu·i·nu) "Corpse” series that will present a large-scale installation of multiple new works. Over the course of several months, Sutherland invited local arts assistants and models to create new full-body sugar sculptures that will be present within the VAC’s ground-level galleries. The project nuances the interrelations of colonial trauma, body politics, dispossession, and belonging. 

The VAC is also pleased to present P. Staff’s Weedkiller for the first time within a Canadian art exhibition. Inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s cancer memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004) - in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. The work reflects on the complex relationship to one’s own suffering for health, drawing into focus how non-normative bodies exist within constant states of external and internal conflict.

Artist biographies:

Julia Rose Sutherland (b.1991) is a Mi’kmaq (Metepenagiag Nation) / settler artist and educator (Assistant Professor at OCADU) based out of Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada). Sutherland’s interdisciplinary art practice employs photography, sculpture, textiles, and performance. She earned her MFA at the University at Buffalo (2019) and BFA in Craft and New Media at the Alberta University of the Arts (2013). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, recently showing work at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art (where she was also a summer 2021 Artist in Resident), the Mackenzie Art Gallery, K Art Gallery, WAAP Gallery, and 59 Rivoli Gallery in Paris, France. Sutherland is a recent recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Creating Knowing Sharing award and the AFA Indigenous Individual Project grant.

Artist Statement
Sutherland navigates trauma and social issues associated with her Indigenous roots as a Mi'kmaq woman of the Metepenagiag Nation of Canada. She addresses commodification, representation, value ll as the identity politics surrounding Indigenous Peoples of North America. With this, she fosters a dialogue regarding the treatment, representation, and voice of these marginalized communities. Often the work emphasizes concepts of loss, absence alongside adapted Metepenagiag Mi'kmaq Nation traditional materials and techniques. Sutherland reconnects a sense of identity through her work and pushes to engage a more mindful conversation around topical subjects such as addiction, mental health, feminism, and Indigenous healing praxis and identity politics.

Through performative action, she engages traditional and spiritual methods such as smudging and other physical acts of exertion to connect herself with the natural landscape and her spirituality. Sutherland draws attention to how colonialism, postcolonial trauma, and economics have had a lasting effect on Mi'kmaq's spiritual well-being, mental health, and health inflictions such as diabetes and heart disease.

P. Staff (b. 1987, UK) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA and London, UK. Their work combines video installation, performance and publishing, citing the ways in which history, technology, capitalism and the law have fundamentally transformed the social constitution of our bodies today. They have exhibited extensively, gaining significant recognition and awards for their work. In 2009, Staff completed a BA in Fine Art Practice and Critical Contemporary Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and subsequently studied Modern Dance at The Place, London in 2011. They were a part of the influential LUX Associate Artist Programme run by curator Ian White at LUX, London in 2010-2011. 

Staff’s work has been exhibited, screened and performed internationally, including solo shows at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017) amongst others. They have been part of a number of significant group shows such as The Body Electric, Walker Art Center (2019); Made in LA, Hammer Museum (2018); Trigger, New Museum (2017); and the British Art Show 8, touring venues (2016). Staff received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2015 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2019. Their work is held in public and private collections internationally including MOMA, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Kiyan Williams is a visual artist and writer from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across performance, sculpture, video, and 2d realms.  Rooted in a process-driven practice, they are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective bodies.  

Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Recess Art, and The Shed. They have given artist talks and lectures at the Hirshhorn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Princeton University, Stanford University, Portland State University, The Guggenheim, and Pratt Institute. Williams’ work is in private and public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  

Williams’ honors and awards include the Astraea Foundation Global Arts Fund and Stanford Arts Award. They were selected to participate in the 2019 In Practice: Other Objects emerging artist exhibition at SculptureCenter and are among the inaugural cohort of artists commissioned by The Shed. Williams was previously an artist fellow at Leslie-Lohman Museum and is an alum of the EMERGENCY fellowship at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU. Williams is the recipient of the 2019/2020 Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, where they were on faculty in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
This exhibition has been assisted by the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts, its arts funding agency.