Arts Research Center Artist-in-Residence Amanda Strong and Visiting Artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett: Screening and Discussion at BAMPFA
Kate MacKay in conversation with Bracken Hanuse Corlett and Amanda Strong on Wednesday, October 30, 2024
As part of their residency, artists Amanda Strong and Bracken Hanuse Corlett screened their work to date and engaged in almost an hour of conversation with attendees. Watching their films and listening to their responses to questions from BAMPFA film curator Kathryn Mackay and audience members, I was struck by the multi-temporal porosity of the worlds they represent in their work, the radical pedagogy at the core of their practice, and the ways in which they modeled sharing and care in their interactions with the audience.
Strong, a Canadian Screen Award and Emmy nominated director, artist, and stop motion storyteller and Corlett, Strong’s partner in life and work, and an interdisciplinary artist in his own right, presented work made over the past decade and gave deep, thoughtful, and generous answers to questions from BAMPFA film curator Kathryn MacKay and the audience. The program was part of the Arts Research Center’s (ARC) twenty plus year artist in residence program, which brings artists to campus for research, to work with students and faculty, and to present work to campus and community audiences. Both Strong and Corlett are indigenous artists who cite their indigeneity as key to their work. On her website, Strong notes that her production company, Spotted Fawn Productions Inc. (SFP) “focuses on process, learning, collaboration and collective making, while uplifting and creating space, training, resources, and skills development for Indigenous, BPOC, LGTBQT2S+ and emerging artists. The team at SFP explores cyclical methods of Indigenous storytelling and nonlinear systems of production and dissemination.”
Within their works, characters travel through time and space, move through the boundary between above and below ground, and see and allow us to see the past within the present. Examples include the ghost caribou and wolf in Biidaaban (2017), remnants of animals displaced by urbanization. Multiple layered realities exist in each moment and at each locale, underscoring both the persistence of indigenous landscapes and stories, and also the hybridity and multiplicity of living beings, including humans. In Four Faces of the Moon (2016), a character who resembles Strong travels back in time with cameras strapped to their back from a darkroom to witness the destruction and colonization of their ancestral landscape. The film begins with an arrow that appears ready to strike a spotted fawn (given the subject position in the film’s dedication, “I am Gidagakoons (Spotted Fawn). This is for my grandmother Olivine Bousquet. It is also for those ancestors who walked before me, People who carried Indigenous language and ceremony, People who held the buffalo in a place of reverence and relied on them for sustenance Before they were systemically destroyed and removed from the land”) but which, by the end of the film flies above the fawn as a companion. The colonial damage represented in the film cannot be erased, but a time before it can be remembered and a better future imagined. Toward the end of the film the narrator tells us, “Do not pay homage to your nightmares. We are awake and stronger within the circle. Carry peace in your heart even when witnessing corrupted shadows.”
The process of stop motion filmmaking is a painstaking one. Puppets are posed within a set and individual frames shot. When played, these frames are blurred by our perception into a seamless narrative. This process underscores Strong and Corlett’s practice of deep seeing and making visible the “unseen” history of land. When asked about why many of their works are set during the night, underwater, or underground, Strong answered that “it can be, for me, an in-between space, a portal for traveling between things…it’s a tool of traveling in between, whether that’s time or elements or levels of like earth or sky or whatever. I always say portals, portals. We need portals.”
Strong’s own entrance into artistic practice was sudden and connected to her indigenous identity and her maternal grandparents. She tells the story, “My grandfather on my mom’s side passed away and I went to his house and collected all of his analog cameras. It was just this weird thing. I had all these negatives of my grandmother, my mom’s mother, who is indigenous and there was just some weird special moment that shifted everything for me. And last minute, I decided to go to art school, which did not impress my family. They were like, wait a minute, you’ve got scholarships to study medicine and you don’t have a scholarship to study photography. I was like, yes.”