Skawennati

Skawennati
Education Concordia University
Known for New Media
Awards Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow (2011)
Website

Skawennati (Skawennati Tricia Fragnito) is a Mohawk multimedia artist, best known for her video games, machinima and costume design, with an emphasis on online works exploring contemporary indigenous culture.

Early life and education

Skawennati comes from the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve in Quebec, home to a sizeable concentration of Mohawk artists and curators.[1] She earned a BFA in Design Arts and a Graduate Diploma of Institutional Administration (Arts Specialization) at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

Career

Skawennati's first major oinline project was the CyberPowWow, an online gathering that occurred several times between 1997 and 2004, usually hosted through galleries such as the Walter Phillips Gallery and arts institutions such as the Banff Centre.[2] She is a multiple award winner, particularly for her project TimeTraveller™, a nine episode machinima series that used science fiction to examine First nations histories.[3] In 2015 she represented Canada at the Biennial of the Americas.[4]

She is the co-founder of Nation to Nation and Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network based at Concordia that holds workshops on Indigenous virtual environments.[2] Skawennati is one of the first recipients of the First People's Curatorial Residency grant, established in 1997 by the Canada Council for the Arts. She was the curatorial resident at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff and is a former board member at Oboro, an artist-run centre in Montreal.

Themes

Through New Media forms, Skawennati addresses history, the future, and change, particularly as they relate to Aboriginal cultures. Her highly acclaimed machinima series, TimeTravellerTM, has episodes on the death of Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the Dakota Sioux Uprising of 1862, the 1990 Oka Crisis, and other watershed events in indigenous history. This multiplatform work "resist[s] pan-Indian and neo-luddite stereotypes of First Nations peoples."[5] CyberPowWow--a chat room functioning as an interactive digital art gallery, allowing people to form communities both online and in real life--provided "a means for indigenous artists and storytellers to secure footing in the digital urban."[6] Skawennati worked with eight indigenous artists and writers who customized the space with images, scripts, and indigenous avatars.[7]

Work

Major exhibitions

Awards and nominations

Skawennati was a 2011 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow, and a Best New Media winner at ImagineNATIVE in 2009 for TimeTraveller™[10] and in 2013 with the AbTeC collective for Skahiòn:hati – Rise of the Kanien’kenhá:ka Legends.[2]

References

  1. ↑ Simpson, Audra (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  2. 1 2 3 Garlow, Nahnda. "Artist Profile: Skawennati – Kahnawake Mohawk". Two Row Times. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  3. ↑ Ore, Jonathan. "Machinima art series revisits Oka Crisis, moments in native history". CBC News. CBC. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  4. ↑ "2015 Biennial of the Americas". Biennial of the Americas. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  5. ↑ LaPensee, Elizabeth (2013). Ng, Jenna, ed. Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds. A&C Black. p. 207. ISBN 9781441149626.
  6. ↑ Gaertner, David (2015). ""Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God's Lake Narrows, and the Contours of Online Indigenous Territory"". American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 39 (4): 56.
  7. ↑ Lewis, Jason (Summer 2005). ""Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace"". Cultural Survival Quarterly. 29 (2). Retrieved 5 July 2016.
  8. ↑ "Niagara Artists Centre | Skawennati: Time Traveller™". nac.org. Retrieved 2016-05-21.
  9. ↑ "Canada's avant-garde set to storm Brock University next week". The Brock News, a news source for Brock University. Retrieved 2016-05-21.
  10. ↑ "ImagineNATIVE". ImagineNATIVE. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 7/5/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.