In aboDIGITAL, Mi’kmaw artist Jordan Bennett examined the interface of audio-visual technologies and the internet with his First Nations heritage. Bennett’s art deftly blends such seemingly disparate elements as Mi’kmaq worldview, hip-hop culture, ceremonial practice and graffiti aesthetics, creating dynamic works that express the fluidity, vitality and continuity of Aboriginal cultures in the present. His works participate in the critical formation of a cross-disciplinary, multi-media, new visual language in contemporary Indigenous art.
In Turning Tables, Bennett drew a comparison between the struggle to revitalize Aboriginal languages and environmental knowledge to the fleeting ephemera of virtual and electronic technologies. The artist observed that just as the DJ movement has revived the use of vinyl, so too can Indigenous people now recover that which has been suppressed through the legacies of colonization and cultural oppression.
In the installation Skull Stories, the resin-cast representations were of four animals significant to the Mi’qmaq - rabbit, coyote, beaver and bear - whose memories come alive in digital form when connected through a virtual spinal cord, a USB. Blending found footage with original video representing the perspective of the animals in their eastern Canadian habitat – including the frequencies each animal can hear, and the colours they can see - the sound and visual installation honoured and remembered the animals that sustained his culture and civilization for millennia. In the Google painting series, Bennett documented a critical moment in our collective colonial history through the ephemera of the internet search engine. Bennett’s paintings enshrine - in an enduring medium - the most ‘Googled’ phrases about Native Americans on the internet that year, preserving a fleeting and uncomfortable reflection of the public perception of Native peoples. Collectively, the artworks in this exhibition demonstrated the artist’s engagement with fortifying and maintaining cultural knowledges and continuities. Bennett’s works restore the past in the present, and documents the present for the future.
Jordan Bennett is a Mi’kmaq visual from Stephenville Crossing, Ktaqamkuk (Newfoundland). He lives and works on his ancestral territory of Mi’kma’ki in Terence Bay, Nova Scotia with his partner in life and art Amy Malbeuf. Jordan's ongoing practice utilizes painting, sculpture, video, installation and sound to explore land, language, the act of visiting, familial histories and challenging colonial perceptions of indigenous histories and presence with a focus on exploring Mi’kmaq and Beothuk visual culture of Ktaqamkuk. In the past 10 years Jordan has participated in over 75 group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as the Smithsonian-National Museum of the American Indian, NYC; MAC-VAL, Paris; The Museum of Art and Design, NYC, NY; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Project Space Gallery, RMIT, Melbourne, AUS; The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Power Plant, Toronto, ON; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, QC; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France and was one of two artists to represent Newfoundland and Labrador in the 2015 Venice Biennial at Galleria Ca’Rezzonico, Venice, Italy as part of the official Collateral Events.
Bennett has been the recipient of several awards and honours, most notably short-listed for the 2018 Sobey Art Award, long-listed for the 2016 and 2015 Sobey Art Award, a Hnatyshan Foundation REVEAL award and presented with the 2014 Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Councils Artist of the Year. Bennett holds a BFA from Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University and an MFA from The University of British Columbia, Okanagan.
For more information on Bennett and his work, visit his website.
Dr. Heather Igloliorte is an Inuk from Nunatsiavut. She is an Assistant Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Art History and Community Engagement and an independent curator of Indigenous art. Igloliorte‘s teaching and research interests center on Indigenous visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, performance and new media art, and the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture.