Virtual Artist Talk: March 15, 7pm. Please RSVP here by March 12. The event recording can be found HERE.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Integrated Learning Series at St. Catherine University and presented in partnership with the Consulate General of Canada in Minneapolis.

Film Screening and Artist Discussion at The O'Shaughnessy with Angela Two Stars and Jaime Black:
Tuesday, February 7, 6–8pm.
Free and open to the public, tickets required. Reserve free tickets here.
St. Catherine University is screening two films: TPT’s documentary, Bring Her Home, and She Draws a Circle, a video performance by artist Jaime Black. Both films foreground the power of art and artists to educate and activate awareness about the historical traumas of settler colonialism and the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit People (MMIWG2S). Artists Angela Two Stars and Jaime Black work at the intersection of art and storytelling to cultivate healing and inspire action. Free tickets must be requested in advance. This event is sponsored by the Amy Marie Series Memorial Visiting Artist Series.

About the films: Bring Her Home follows three Indigenous women – an artist, an activist, and a politician – as they fight to vindicate and honor their missing and murdered relatives who have fallen victims to a growing epidemic across Indian country. Despite the lasting effects from historical trauma, each woman must search for healing while navigating racist systems that brought about this very crisis.

She Draws a Circle reflects on the work of generations of women to interrupt cycles of violence and oppression, looking to the ways in which our spiritual connections to the land and one another help us to hold space for regenerative healing, bringing the hidden to light drawing on that light to encircle each successive generation. Distributed by Video Pool Media Arts Centre.

Exhibition statement by the artist: She Holds Water traces the intimacies and interconnections between our bodies and the waters we come from, the waters that we are. Through performance art, ceremony, video, and installation, Black dissolves the borders between body and land, between our inner and outer geographies, diving into the currents of our spiritual and emotional selves and finding ourselves there, reflected in each other.

Press:
Christina Schmid, Dream Dream Revolution: Dive Bars, Ghosts, and One Red Ribbon, Mn Artists

Throughout my artistic career I have traveled and exhibited an installation project called The REDress Project throughout the country and internationally. This work draws attention to the systemic colonial frameworks that result in violence against Indigenous women and girls. While working with and through trauma, it became necessary to expand my perspective to recognize the immense capacity for creating strength, wisdom and power through healing practices tied to reconnecting with land, water and Indigenous cultural/spiritual practices.

Over the past six years my practice has expanded to explore all the ways in which myself and my community find healing and reconnection while at the same time continuing to experience violence and colonialism. For my work this has meant a shift towards embodiment and working with and through the body in connection with the lands, waters and circles of women. This work brought me to create a series of photographs in 2017 titled conversations with the land in which intimate/cathartic and healing moments between myself and the land work as a way to express and release trauma and to regain a sense of grounding and power. Throughout the years, I have created many performance art pieces, photographic works and, more recently, video works that explore the concept of going to the lands and waters to heal and to reconnect to self. In the last year I have been centering my practice around the importance of water as a living entity, capable of holding, caring for and nurturing all of life on earth and exploring the importance of our connection to water through my work.

Jaime Black is a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe and European descent who lives and works in Winnipeg. Black’s practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place, and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of cultural and spiritual knowledge.

Black is the creator of The REDress Project, which was on view at St. Catherine University in the fall of 2021. Learn more here.