2024
River Dories & River Stories
The collective will produce three river dories (often called “drift boats,” which are made of plywood), one for the UCC campus and one for the Norval campus, which will be adorned with Indigenous river symbology, and other stories, images, printed forms. The boats will be used as a printed surface enabling the students to engage in various transfer processes. A zine/broadsheet will be created by the artists and circulated as documentation for others who wish to realize and integrate this project into future curriculum plans. The completed vessels will be launched at Norval on the last day.
Students and artists and teachers were stationed at the platform tents that overlook the former “Indian meadow” and the Credit River. These tents became a series of pop-up studios forming a temporary collective space for cohabitation, art making, discussion, and story-telling.
The project responds to the WE CALL: Upper Canada College’s “Call to Action” that supports collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. The boat building enacts various forms of “crossing” and “drifting” between different knowledge systems (design, fabrication and function), ways of being “settled” on water/land, and the site-specificity of the Credit River and Treaty 19 land (Indigenous narratives, colonial history and the current Norval campus). The word “drift” evokes the situationist idea of “derive” whereby the vessel and its passengers can “meander” along the river, which changes course and flows in a bend or curve.
The project responds to the WE CALL: Upper Canada College’s “Call to Action” that supports collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. The boat building enacts various forms of “crossing” and “drifting” between different knowledge systems (design, fabrication and function), ways of being “settled” on water/land, and the site-specificity of the Credit River and Treaty 19 land (Indigenous narratives, colonial history and the current Norval campus). The word “drift” evokes the situationist idea of “derive” whereby the vessel and its passengers can “meander” along the river, which changes course and flows in a bend or curve.
166 7th Street // Gowanus Studio Space
Brooklyn, New York 11215