GALLERY HOURS
Tuesday to Saturday | 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM | Free Admission
Manuel Axel Strain, a howl (2023)
Photo: Dennis Ha. Image courtesy the artist and Unit 17.
Waking Ground:
Manuel Axel Strain
Opening Reception
Saturday, March 16, 2024 | 2:00-4:00 PM
Exhibition
March 16 - May 11, 2024
Waking Ground is a solo exhibition of recent works by Manuel Axel Strain, a 2-spirit xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Simpcw and Syilx artist. Moving within the intertwined relationships between land, their family, and themselves, Strain’s work is often produced in collaboration with their relatives. They simultaneously celebrate the knowledge passed to them from family, while confronting ongoing realities of colonialism.
In interdisciplinary mediums of painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and video, the works within Waking Ground create a through line between ancestral artistic traditions and the present moment. Several paintings imagery inspired by pictographs located across Coast Salish territory, and many images and voices of Strain’s family members are found and heard throughout the Gallery. The land is awakened through the continuance of Indigenous knowledge and gathering of community.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Manuel Axel Strain is a 2-spirit artist from the lands and waters of Musqueam, Simpcw and Sylix peoples, based in the sacred region of their Katzie and Kwantlen relatives. Strain’s mother is Tracey Strain and father is Eric Strain, Tracey’s parents are Harold Eustache (from Chuchua) and Marie Louis (from nkmapqs), Eric’s parents are Helen Point (Musqueam) and John Strain (from Ireland). Although they attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design they prioritize Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and ancestors.
Creating artwork in collaboration with and reference to their relatives, their shared experiences become a source of agency that resonates through their work with performance, land, paintings, sculpture, photography, video, sound and installation. Their artworks often envelop subjects in relation with ancestral and community ties, Indigeneity, labour, resource extraction, gender, Indigenous medicine, and life forces. Strain often perceives their work to confront and undermine the imposed realities of colonialism. Proposing a new space beyond its oppressive systems of power. They have contributed work to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, the UBCO Fina Gallery, were longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Award and were a recipient of the 2022 Portfolio Prize.
