By Sarah Wallace

Northern Indigenous art project coming to Mann Art Gallery

Aug 26, 2015 | 6:45 AM

The Mann Art Gallery in Prince Albert will be hosting a unique project throughout the month of September.

Jesse Campbell, director and curator of the gallery said the Northern Indigenous Media Arts Project exhibition will begin Thursday Aug. 27.

In the months of July and August four artists and cultural leaders from the Prince Albert area and Saskatoon came up to the north to La Ronge, Muskoday First Nation and the city of Prince Albert.

“They worked with youth from ages eight through 14 to produce some different works of art in photo media,” Campbell explained.

“They spent a few days with different groups of kids exploring ideas of identity and heritage, all of their interests and the places that they live. [With the children] they worked on producing different types of photos and videos that expressed all of these notions.”

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This is a fairly new project that was started last year as a pilot project by Aleyna Morin.

“At that point she was a summer student at the Mann Art Gallery and she had this idea for a project that would really engage aboriginal youth with different photo media tools which they may not otherwise have had access,” Campbell explained.

She said Morin wanted to see how the kids explored their homes and the places that they lived.

Another really important component of the project was at each workshop location the youth would get to interact with an elder from the area.

“It was a great combination of traditional heritage oral storytelling traditions combined with these new forms of visual expression.”

The workshops the kids attended featured a number of local artists as workshop leaders, including Morin herself.

The leaders included Tim Moore, an artists that works out of Round Lake, Marcel Petit, a professional photographer/videographer out of Saskatoon and John MacDonald, an artist and writer who works out of Christopher Lake.

“They were all really excited and keen to bring their different backgrounds, skills and ideas to this projects.”

The Mann Art Gallery took on the pilot project last year and worked with the Indigenous Peoples Artist Collective (IPAC).

“This year we decided that we wanted to take it to the next step. So we applied for funding from Sask Culture through their Aboriginal Arts and Culture Leadership Grant and luckily they have been extremely supportive of this project,” Campbell said.

She said they are also receiving sponsorship from SIGA and again from IPAC.

“It’s [a project] that’s growing. It’s something we definitely plan to continue every summer.”

The exhibition will feature pieces from around 20 youths and Campbell said they hope to grow those numbers into the future.  

“One obstacle that we had to deal with, and obviously we’re not exclusive in this, is the forest fires this summer. We did plan to go to more northern locations but things had to be adjusted but that’s ok,” she explained.

She said they plan to hit more locations next summer.

The exhibition will be up and ongoing until the end of September.

swallace@panow.com

On Twitter: @sarahthesquid