The SFU School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to welcome Jackson Polys as the 2022 Spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence.
As a key contributor to New Red Order, a public secret society, Polys has worked collaboratively to employ a multiplicity of swerving strategies than aim to approach questions around desires for Indigeneity: How to locate the persistence, the limits, and viability of those desires, manifest in recurrent settler colonial determinations and habits? How to ingest what might be seen as inappropriate urges to merge, in order to rechannel those desires into paths for the expansion of Indigenous growth and agency? Through the work of NRO, these questions open into an induction process, implicating and drawing in people of multiple subject positions, with varying proximities to Indigenous experience. As Indigeneity is actively produced as a commodity, what properties are we being made to consume?
During his time in Vancouver, Polys will present a free public lecture on his work. In conjunction with SCA faculty member Raymond Boisjoly, Polys will also work closely with third-year visual art students towards conceptualizing and creating work for the BFA Project, an annual student exhibition in the Audain Gallery. Culture/Cultural Figures, this year’s BFA Project, explores the possibilities for research, theoretical orientations, and practice-based inquiries concerning culture in both its noun and adjectival forms. The work presented in Culture/Cultural Figures takes up notions of the nature/culture divide, ideas of sociality, and negotiations of positionality and politics in a reflexive manner. Student work will look at how we come to understand the cultural world that binds us to others.
Biography
Jackson Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist from Tlingit territory, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. At an early age, he began carving with his father, Tlingit artist Nathan Jackson, from the Lukaax.ádi Clan of the Lkóot Kwáan, and he belongs to the Dak lʼaweidí Clan of the Chilkat Kwáan. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and was the recipient of a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society who, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produce video, performance, and installation works that examine and aim to shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. His individual and collaborative works have appeared at the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Artists Space, Burke Museum, eflux, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Images Festival, Kunstverein in Hamburg, MIT, MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Park Avenue Armory, Sundance Film Festival, Union Docs, Toronto Biennial of Art, Walker Arts Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.
About the Audain Visual Artist in Residence
The Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR) program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. Past residences have included Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Heba Y. Amin, Alejandro Cesarco, Raven Chacon, Sarah Pierce, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Hito Steyerl, and many others. The visiting artists interact with the students and faculty of the School for the Contemporary Arts as well as the broader visual arts and cultural communities. In keeping with the experimental nature of the School for the Contemporary Arts the terms of engagement are open and change from artist to artist. The cornerstone of the residency is the sharing of artistic research. At the start of the global pandemic artists and curators such as Tanya Lukin Linklater, Pablo José Ramirez, Jeremy Deller, Irena Haiduk, Sanja Iveković, Charles Gaines, Samson Young, and Ursula Johnson participated in our Visual Art Forum. The AVAIR program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.
