This Will Be the First of a Thousand Worlds We Give Life To

Dion Smith-Dokkie
November 24–January 20 / Tue–Sat / 12–6
Opening November 24, 7pm–9pm, with artist talk at 7:30pm

Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC
gachet.org / 604.687.2468

Since 2014, Smith-Dokkie has embarked on a personal and critical investigation of the resource extraction industries in northeastern British Columbia (NEBC) and their impalpable impacts on the area's landscape and residents. The exhibition is a physical manifestation of research, ideas and themes concerning neo-colonial expansive terraformation and gestures that mark Indigenous autonomy and presence in the face of continuing settler colonial dispossession.

In This Will Be the First of a Thousand Worlds We Give Life To, we witness a new approach to cartography – a counter map, an alternate account of things. Smith-Dokkie's unorthodox mixed media paintings are discombobulating, disorientating, and almost insurgent. They are maps that emerge from painted remediations overtop conventional topographic maps, maps whose flesh-like organic materiality establishes a relational network of aliveness possessed by the bodies and landscapes they represent, maps that cannot be unraveled with a legend–maps that make themselves obscure in an act of cultural preservation that confounds the colonial imagination and its machinations that aim to stabilize its worldview at the price of the "other."