My Life as an Avatar: Artist Talk with Skawennati
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Video Still from Skawennati's She Falls for Ages, 2017, in Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art.
Installation view of Skawennati’s She Falls for Ages, 2017, in Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, at Wrightwood 659, 2023 © 2023 Alphawood Exhibitions LLC, Chicago. Courtesy: Alphawood Exhibitions LLC, Chicago. Photo: Michael Tropea.
Join us for My Life as an Avatar, a lecture featuring Skawennati, an acclaimed net artist from the Kahnawà:ke (Mohawk) Territory. The program expands on her work featured in Difference Machines titled She Falls for Ages, a movie made in the virtual reality program Second Life through the recording of avatars. Using digital tools to craft alternate worlds, Skawennati explores counter-modalities of the future, deconstructing Eurocentric frameworks and encouraging audiences to question their internalized notions of what comes next. My Life as an Avatar unpacks the possibilities of emerging technologies and how they can be used to rewrite indigenous presence in the cyber landscape.
Speaker Bio
Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. Her machinimas and machinimagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others.
Recipient of a 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions Grant and an Honorary Doctorate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she is also a founding board member of daphne, Montreal’s first Indigenous artist-run centre. She co-founded and co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network based at Concordia University, where she received her BFA. Originally from Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati resides in Montreal. She is represented by ELLEPHANT.
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