OLIVIA WHETUNG

INAWENDIWOK

Stand, 2019; Rabbit feeds the forest, 2021-22.

Exhibition

Art Gallery of Mississauga, 2024
Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid

A member of Curve Lake First Nation and citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation, artist Olivia Whetung draws upon her experience working on and with the land to create artworks that speak of the interdependence and relationality within our ecosystem.

Researching land-based and food de-commodifying movements, Anishinaabe knowledge, and the ecology of her home territory, Whetung has produced a series of sculptural installations, digital prints, and three-dimensional beadworks that articulate the vital connectivity between woodland, wetland, and garden environments. The artist’s first-hand observations are nourished by a critical understanding of Western agricultural models and natural science methodologies as detrimental to the ecologies of Southern Ontario, where they have caused massive environmental destruction. Western worldviews, brought over by European settlers, treat only cleared farmland as “productive” while deeming woodland and wetland unmanageable and useless. These outlooks centre human needs and desires at the expense of the ecosystem’s survival.

Rabbit feeds the forest (detail), 2021-22.

Whetung’s poignant works solicit our attention and reconsideration of spaces and species that are crucial to biodiversity and to sustainable food production. Tenderly foregrounding our more-than-human neighbours, they remind us that we are not the only ones to benefit from the land’s gifts, nor to suffer from ecological ruin. The exhibition’s Anishinaabemowin title, inawendiwok, loosely translates as “they are related to each other,” emphasizing the ways in which coexistence within the ecosystem is mutually linked. With human yearning for endlessly available resources and sanitized nature comes devastating loss. Only through a renewed understanding of kinship and gratitude may we restore an ecology based on responsibility and reciprocity that can sustain the future.

Installation view; Foreground: Jewelweed gloves, 2022, and For the rusty-patched bumble bee, 2022

Left to right: this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people, 2022; a true food revolution, 2023.

this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people (detail), 2022

this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people (detail), 2022

Left to right: For the rusty-patched bumble bee, 2022, and Jewelweed gloves, 2022

Left to right: Untitled 1 & 2, 2018; Eulogy, 2023

Artist Info

Olivia Whetung is a member of Curve Lake First Nation and a citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation. Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions at Gallery 44, Toronto (2018); Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna (2018); Artspace, Peterborough (2017); and 180 Projects, Sault Ste. Marie. She has contributed to two-person and group exhibitions at Queen’s University, Kingston (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2018-19); Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto (2018); Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2017); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Western Front, Vancouver (2016); VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver (2016); Open Space, Victoria (2014); and many others. She completed her BFA with a minor in Anishinaabemowin at Algoma University (2013) and her MFA in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia (2016). She was awarded the John Hartman Award in 2018, the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in 2016, and is a recipient of a CGS-M Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Award and an Aboriginal Graduate Fellowship. In 2019 she was awarded a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts.