We are delighted to invite you to a special artist talk featuring artists Skawennati and Nadia Myre, two leading figures in contemporary Indigenous art in Canada. This event celebrates their landmark solo exhibitions currently on view at the National Gallery of Canada: Welcome to the Dreamhouse and Waves of Want. These exhibitions offer a rich look at each artist’s evolving practice and their influential contributions to Indigenous visual culture, digital media, and storytelling.
Moderated by artists and Studio Arts Professor, Hannah Claus, this conversation will bring the two artists in dialogue, offering insights into their respective creative journeys, conceptual frameworks, and shared commitments to community, memory, and futurity.
Join us in person or through Zoom for what promises to be a thought provoking and inspiring conversation, reflection and celebration.
Date: Thursday, July 3, 2025
Time: 6 PM EST
Location: York Amphitheatre, EV-1.615, 1515 rue Ste-Catherine O.
Online: https://concordia-ca.zoom.us/s/85388187202
Bios
Welcome to the Dreamhouse tells the story of Skawennati’s dynamic artistic trajectory as she envisions Indigenous people in the future. Rooted in Haudenosaunee storytelling, her avatars, costumes, machinimas and prints playfully imagine and create a place where Indigenous people thrive.
Waves of Want looks at Nadia Myre’s artistic and critical process over the past two decades, including exciting new works recently created in France. Navigating complex histories of nationhood and memory, her work fosters profound dialogues on collective identity, resilience, and the politics of belonging.
Skawennati creates art from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman, and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her machinimas and machinimagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture question our relationships with technology, and highlight Indigenous people of the future. Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Skawennati co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation studio-lab at Concordia University in Montreal. She is also on the boards of Rhizome, and of daphne: Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre, which she-co-founded. Originally from Kahnawà:ke, Skawennati resides in Montreal.
Contemporary artist Nadia Myre is an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, who lives and works in Montreal. For more than two decades, her multi-disciplinary practice has included stitchwork, photography, video, sculpture, textiles and installation – inspired by community participation and relations, while also exploring themes such as resilience, language, memory and longing. Myre’s art examines what is misunderstood, unseen, or lost in transformation and translation, and reflects shared experiences of nationhood, belonging, and isolation.
Hannah Claus is a transdisciplinary artist of Kanien’kehá:ka / English heritage who engages Onkwehon:we epistemology to highlight ways of understanding and being in relation with the world. A 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow and 2020 recipient of the Prix Giverny, recent group exhibitions include: Wheturangitia at The Dowse, in Aotearoa, the touring exhibition Radical Stitch at the McKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, and Plastic Heart at the University of Toronto Art Gallery and the Centre Culturelle Canadien in Paris, France. She is an Associate Professor, Frameworks and Interventions of Indigenous Art Practice in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University, and Research Chair, Onkwehonwené:ha. She is a member of Kenhtèke.