Charlene Vickers: Big Blue Smudge
Charlene Vickers’ practice explores memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands
Jan. 21 – April 22, 2022
College Art Gallery 1
Curator: Leah Taylor
Big Blue Smudge presents recent paintings and new large-scale sculptural works by Charlene Vickers, an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Vickers' practice explores memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands.
Vickers' work responds to the Coast Salish territory she has resided on for the last 30 years, while simultaneously acknowledging her deep connection to Wauzhushk Onigum in northwestern Ontario, the place where she is from. For Vickers, territory is a place of existence rather than one of ownership. Her conceptual concerns include meditations on power, protection, reclamation and kinship. Her sculptural works point to current social and cultural conditions through a varied material repertoire, from hair scrunchies and yoga mats to an oversized carved cedar bone bead.
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