[Wamvan] Beat Nation @ VAG

[Lindsay Miles]

Vancouver Art Gallery, Feb 25 - June 3rd


http://www.beatnation.org/index.html
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*Beat Nation* reflects a generation of artists who juxtapose urban youth
culture with Aboriginal identity in entirely innovative and unexpected
ways. Using hip hop and other forms of popular culture, artists create
surprising new cultural hybrids—in painting, sculpture, installation,
performance and video—that reflect the changing demographics of Aboriginal
people today.

In Vancouver, the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Nations have been
a meeting ground for urban Aboriginal youth for decades and, since the
early 1990s, hip hop has been a driving force of activism in the community.
The roots of hip hop culture and music have been transformed into forms
that echo current realities of young people, creating dynamic forums for
storytelling and indigenous language, as well as new modes of political
expression. This movement has been influential across disciplines—similar
strategies appear in the visual arts where artists remix, mash-up and
juxtapose the old with the new, the rural with the urban, traditional and
contemporary as a means to rediscover and reinterpret Aboriginal culture
within the shifting terrains of the mainstream.

While this exhibition takes its starting point from hip hop, it branches
out to include artists who use pop culture, graffiti, fashion and other
signifiers of urban life in combination with more traditional forms of
Aboriginal identity. Artists create unique cultural hybrids that include
graffiti murals with Haida figures, sculptures carved out of skateboard
decks, abstract paintings with form-line design, live video remixes with
Hollywood films, and hip hop performances in Aboriginal languages, to name
a few. While focused on artists working along the West Coast, *Beat
Nation* brings
together artists from across the Americas and reveals the shared
connections between those working in vastly different places.

As signifiers of Aboriginal identity and culture continue to shift and
transform, and older traditions find renewed meaning in new forms of
expression, one thing remains constant: a commitment to politics, to
storytelling, to Aboriginal languages, to the land and rights, whether it
be with drums skins or turntables, natural pigments or spray paint,
ceremonial dancing or break dancing.

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and based on an initiative of grunt
gallery. Co-curated by Kathleen Ritter, associate curator, Vancouver Art
Gallery, and Tania Willard, a Secwepemc artist, designer and curator.
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