Team – Shifting Ground

Ruth Beer

Ruth Beer is a Vancouver-based artist and academic whose practice includes sculpture, video, and interactive media, and whose recent work investigates the contested geographies and materialities of resource extraction, particularly in the context of rural and remote communities of the Pacific Northwest. Ruth has previously served as PI on other SSHRC-funded research and creation projects such as Catch and Release: Mapping Cultural and Geographic Transitions, which centred upon the demise of the Pacific salmon canning industry, and Trading Routes: Grease Trails, Oil Futures, which addressed the overlapping terrains of historic oolichan oil trade routes and modern petrochemical pipelines. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, Ruth’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including those at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Raglan Street Gallery (Melbourne), Bellevue Museum (Washington), and Nordic House (Iceland). Ruth is Professor of Visual Art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Tomas Borsa

lineinthesand.ca
unmediatedjournal.com

Tomas Borsa is a writer, filmmaker, and documentary photographer with an interest in the politics and poetics of digital infrastructures. Tomas has published in a wide range of outlets including Vice, Canadian Journal of Communication, and Critical Planning, and on a wide range of topics, from the re-framing of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Indigenous community newspapers to the future imaginaries of the Internet on Haida Gwaii. A recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award from the Communication and Media Studies Research Network, Tomas’ acclaimed feature film Line in the Sand (with Jean-Philippe Marquis, 2015) examined the sociocultural impacts of the (then) proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and was screened at festivals worldwide. Raised on Treaty 6 Territory in south central Saskatchewan, Tomas is presently based in the United Kingdom, where he is a Doctoral candidate in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Warren Cariou

warrencariou.com

Warren Cariou is a Winnipeg-based writer, filmmaker, photographer, and academic whose work explores themes of community, environment, orality and belonging in the Canadian west, with particular focus on the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. His books The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs and Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging have won and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction and the Drainie-Taylor Prize for Biography. Warren is a member of the Six Seasons of the Asiniskow Ithiniwuk collaborative storytelling and writing project, involving Rocky Cree Communities in Manitoba, as well as a researcher with the Wa Ni Ska Tan Hydro Alliance, an interdisciplinary research team studying the effects of hydroelectric development on Indigenous communities. Warren directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba, where he also teaches in the Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media.

Caitlin Chaisson

caitlinchaisson.com

Caitlin Chaisson is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose research and practice revolves around questions pertaining to the body and natural environment, as well as the social systems which emanate from and inform one and the other. Caitlin has recently presented work at the Charles H. Scott Gallery (Vancouver), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Unit/Pitt and Ranger Station Art Gallery (Harrison), while her writing has been published in Espace Magazine, Breach Magazine, Decoy Magazine, Relate North and Canadian Art. Caitlin is the founder of Far Afield, an artist-led initiative that supports rural and regionally-connected artistic and curatorial practices, and in addition to her professional curatorial work, Caitlin is currently an MA candidate in curatorial studies at Bard College.

Julie Decker

anchoragemuseum.org

Julie Decker is an artist, writer, and the Director/CEO of the Anchorage Museum, a leading centre for scholarship, engagement, and investigation of Alaska and the North. Julie’s career has focused on the people and environment of Northern places, building projects, and initiatives in service to local and global communities. Before becoming Director/CEO, Julie served as the Anchorage Museum’s Chief Curator; previously, she had served as Director of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art and the TrailerArtsCenter, both in Anchorage, as well as an instructor of art history for the University of Alaska. Julie has curated and designed numerous exhibitions, taught classes, and authored and edited numerous publications on subjects ranging from contemporary art and architecture of the North to the Arctic environment. She serves on the board of the Alaska Design Forum, the Anchorage Museum Building Committee and the Alaska Native Arts Foundation, and her publications include Up Here: The North at the Center of the World (ed. with Kirsten Anderson, 2016), and North: Finding Place in Alaska (ed., 2017).

Tsēmā Igharas

tsema.ca

Tsēmā Igharas is an interdisciplinary artist and a member of the Tahltan First Nation whose work explores the material relationships between the body and land. Grounded in Potlatch methodologies and informed by strategies of Indigenous resistance to neo-colonization, Tsēmā deconstructs the imaginary of the ‘true North’ by foregrounding the reverberations of extractive industry felt by those who live downstream. Tsēmā is a contributing member and representative for ReMatriate Collective, and was the 2018 recipient of the Emily Award for outstanding alumni of Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Tsēmā has participated in numerous residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in addition to residencies in Italy and the Philippines, and has exhibited and performed her work throughout Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Chile.

Timo Jokela

ulapland.fi

Timo Jokela is a Finnish artist and art educator based in Rovaniemi, Northern Finland, whose work takes a site-specific and participatory approach in developing art and design projects and relationships with Saami communities. Timo is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland and the Director of the University of the Arctic’s ASAD (Arctic Sustainable Art and Design) thematic network. Timo’s work has been exhibited widely and makes frequent use of natural materials (e.g. wood, snow, ice) and elements of local cultural heritage in an effort to unpack the relations between environment and aesthetic. Timo’s academic contributions have tended to focus on the phenomenological relationship between art and nature, community-based art, and art education, and include Relate North – Practising Place: Heritage, Art and Design for Creative Communities (ed. with Glen Coutts, 2016). Timo also serves as a Visiting Professor of Environmental Art and Art Education at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Lindsay McIntyre

tinymovingpictures.com

Lindsay McIntyre is a film artist of Inuk/settler Scottish descent who works primarily with analog film and experimental, handmade, and documentary techniques. Interested simultaneously in the apparatus of cinema, portraiture, representation, and personal histories (with strong links to Canada’s North), Lindsay specialises in process-based film techniques and has contributed a significant body of knowledge to celluloid-based practices around the world (e.g. the practice of silver gelatin emulsion making and coating for motion picture film). A recipient of the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation, Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Excellence in Media Arts from the Canada Council for the Arts, and many others, Lindsay’s films have been shown at venues worldwide including Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives, Mono No Aware, Rotterdam, l’Alternativa, WNDX, Edinburgh International, and imagineNATIVE. Lindsay is Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Jeneen Frei Njootli

mfineart.ca

Jeneen Frei Njootli is an interdisciplinary 2SQ Vuntut Gwich’in artist invested in Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization, and whose work frequently deconstructs the history of the materials she uses, e.g. by investigating their relationship to trade, ceremonial regalia, and the politics of Indigenous art. A founding member of the ReMatriate Collective, Jeneen was a 2017 longlist nominee and 2018 shortlist nominee for the national Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of major awards including the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver Artist Prize and the Luminaries Award from the Museum of Northwest Art. Jeneen’s recent exhibitions and performances include those at the Remai Modern (Saskatoon, 2019), Encuentro, (Mexico City, 2019), La Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel, France, 2019), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2018), Fierman Gallery (New York, 2018), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, 2019), and the Toronto Biennale (Toronto, 2019). Jeneen is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Sheena Wilson

sheenawilson.ca

Sheena Wilson is Professor of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta as well as co-founder and Director of the Petrocultures Research Group. Sheena works within the broad terrain of feminist and decolonial methodologies, and takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to the study of extractivist world-views, be that in terms of land and resources, exploitation of gendered, classed and racialized bodies, or the erasure of embodied knowledge therein. In addition to her involvement with Shifting Ground, Sheena is PI of the SSHRC-funded Feminist Energy Futures: Power Shift and Environmental Social Justice, co-led by Dr. Sourayan Mookerjea, and is the research lead on Just Powers, a major research initiative focused on climate justice and funded by the Future Energy Systems’ Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), a Tri-Council SSHRC Insight grant, the Francophone Secretariat of Alberta, and the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies (KIAS). Sheena’s publication highlights include Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Cultures (ed. with Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman, 2017) as well as an in-process monograph entitles Deep Energy Literacy: Toward Feminist Energy Futures.