Join us at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library on Saturday, June 30 for a performance of Potato Gardens Band (2018) by Krista Belle Stewart. This event is organized by 221A Fellow Jenn Jackson, as part of her curatorial research project sum of the parts.
For the closing sum of the parts program, Krista Belle Stewart will perform Potato Gardens Band through the deposit of a familial document to the Pollyanna 圖書館 Library sum of the parts research collection. This gesture furthers Stewart’s precise and meaningful interrogation of archival materials, structures and systems. It operates in citation of historic colonial erasure and foregrounds the relationship of Indigenous identity within and beyond the traditional confines of archival address. An unmarked three-gallon utility bucket will host Stewart’s familial document—50lbs of soil from Spaxomin (Douglas Lake), drawn from her maternally inherited property. Its contents will remain entrusted to Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, in wait of future activation. Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation. She produces work that bears rich knowledge, relationships, intuition and complexity, that is expressed through the rearticulation of ongoing projects and processes which never close and remain open to ongoing negotiations of resources, contexts, publics and institutions.
Throughout the spring season, 221A hosts sum of the parts, a curatorial research project by Jenn Jackson which brings together a selection of films, performances and installations by artists who activate personal histories which are drawn from familial and public record. Artists Deanna Bowen, Felix Kalmenson, Divya Mehra, Krista Belle Stewart, and Casey Wei, present compelling excavations of the past, by drawing from familial, historic, and archival sources; visualizing narratives of race and class, and their recognition within official records.