Woven Room
Brenda Christine St. Pierre (Victoria), Jason Hunt (Victoria)
October 26 — November 3
Open Space is pleased to host Woven Room, an installation by Brenda Christine St. Pierre and Jason Hunt. Woven Room is part of the Healing and Transforming in a Contemporary World: Aboriginal Underground Art Crawl to commence on Saturday Nov 3rd at 7PM.
Brenda Christine St. Pierre employs traditional Native weaving both as a practice and symbolic gesture that connects her to her Cree-Sarcee-Metis heritage. Jason Hunt incorporates the carving style of the Kwakwaka ‘waku Nation, as taught to him by his father, Stan Hunt.
With Woven Room, large woven panels are assembled with mixed media (both from the natural and
industrial worlds) and embedded into the walls of Open Space’s resource center. This three dimensional
piece transforms a portion of the gallery space into a site of cross cultural dialogue. Woven Room blurs
misguided binaries that exist between the “traditional” and the “modern”, between catagorical definitions
of “art” and “craft”. St. Pierre and Hunt’s piece builds this tension in their strategic use of materials and
juxtaposition.
Woven Room is additionally inscribed with that of the “personal” marked by historical narratives and
past relationships. St. Pierre’s weaving suggest histories that both intersect harmoniously and those that
potentially constitute (past) conflict. Incorporating cloth (cut pieces) from a Hudson Bay Company blanket
for example recalls the tensions of initial encounters between First Nations communities and European
based trading companies. On another level, St. Pierre’s piece signifies a home, one she may long for on a
personal level and one that signifies an exchange between First and Fourth worlds. In St. Pierre’s words, “I
am a woman of two worlds, and two families. I attempt . . . to weave pathways ‘to and fro’, searching for
that something new.”
Woven Room is one of multiple pieces that will be exhibited on the evening of November 3 as part of The
Aboriginal Underground Art Crawl. Other venues include The Ministry of Casual Living (1442 Haultain St.)
and The Fifty Fifty Arts Collective (2516 Douglas St.).
Woven Room continues at Open Space until November 10th, 2007