Earthwork

Mikinaak Migwans’s solo curatorial debut challenges dominant framings of both modernist land art and ancestral burial mounds, substituting a dynamic vision of earthwork as verb and process for Western art history’s static construction of earthwork as noun and object. The provocative exhibition design places an accent on flame-orange through benches reminiscent of barricades or flood barriers.

Fire looms large in Art Hunter’s powerful documentation of Anishinaabeg stewardship of the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung mounds on the banks of the Rainy River. Hunter’s dramatic photographs and illuminating video interviews exemplify the exhibition’s repositioning of earthwork as a form of direct action sustaining ancestral ecologies. Honouring plant life as an active site of memorialization, artist collective BUSH Gallery’s adjacent assemblage of tipi fragments, Plants as[are] Monuments (2021), unfurls a sympathetic ethos. Its titular paraphrase of the Tuscarora artist and scholar Jolene Rickard was articulated by exposing fireweed to the sun. One of the first plants to emerge from the devastation wrought by forest fire, fireweed carries multivalent meanings: A symbol of the cataclysmic effects of combustion in the Anthropocene, it also signifies the regenerative role of flame in controlled burns that encourage the growth of medicines—an immemorial practice of inter-species care whose longevity troubles logics of linear periodization.