Charlene Vickers | Alberta Magazine Awards Finalist

Galleries West is pleased to present a special six-part showcase of stories and videos that have been selected as finalists for the Alberta Magazine Awards. Winners will be announced Sept. 22 at the annual conference of the the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association. Today’s video, nominated in the Digital Project category, was first published Oct. 4, 2021.

Charlene Vickers, an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver, explores memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands through painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Her exhibition, Ancestor Gesture, at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver until Jan. 2, 2022, brings together works from the last decade, including an eight-foot-long sculptural cedar bead and abstract drawings inspired in part by traditional quillwork embroidery. “I take that idea of sewing, and reclamation of quillwork and beading, and translate that into a painting,” Vickers tells Mark Mushet in this video commissioned by Galleries West. “I kind of see that as an ancestral gesture.” Vickers, from Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, near Kenora in northwestern Ontario, graduated from what is now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1994 and earned an MFA from Simon Fraser University in 2013. She received a VIVA Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement by mid-career artists in British Columbia, in 2018. Vickers has been included in significant shows, such as Where Do We Go From Here? and Ambivalent Pleasures, both at the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as international group shows in New Zealand and the United States.