The Stìnesten Gallery marks year-long milestone in Tk’emlúps 

The Stìnesten Gallery celebrated its first year as a part of the Indigenous Resurgence Project, supporting storytelling, creativity and collaborative arts in Secwepemcúĺecw.

The Red Ribbon Round It: A Ceremony into Tomorrow exhibition and anniversary celebration hosted at 140 Laburnum St. on Friday, Nov. 6 featured a group exhibition focused on the experience and erasure of Indigenous women, highlighting the complexities of grief, strength and reclamation.

“In my experience, there is a lot of fear and grief and anger about what you’re allowed to do,” Shay Paul, Indigenous Resurgence director and Stìnesten Gallery curator said about being an Indigenous woman. 

“Whether Missing, Murdered and Indigenous Women and Girls has impacted you personally or not, it’s still on your mind and it shapes the way you approach the world we live in.”

The central theme of the group exhibition was focused on the experience of Indigenous women, which was ultimately driven by a visiting artist from southeastern B.C., Lesley Garlow.

A Cayuga artisan who resides in Nelson but studies fine arts in Penticton, Garlow was the featured artist in the spotlight during the opening reception. Their exhibition is open until Dec. 19.

“It’s taken me nearly a complete year to create these pieces and to co-curate this exhibition with Shay,” Garlow said. “One thing that I think colonization has done really well is isolate us from each other and make it feel like these are not the right things to talk about. I just wanted to share something, so that maybe somebody else doesn’t feel alone. It’s okay to struggle and fall away sometimes, but it’s possible to come back… there’s a lot of love in this community.”

This month’s exhibition also included artist submissions that focused on addressing sexual reclamation as sovereignty, anger as release and the impact of using unconventional art projects to express heavy themes to challenge visitors to think critically about the climate of being an Indigenous woman in Canada. Within the show, there were mixed media submissions along with paintings, installations, photography and 3D sculptures.

While many of the themes focused on being Indigenous in Canada, there were several pieces that were created as a result of the gang rape that recently occurred at Cornell University and the impact of violence on women.

The celebration welcomed approximately a dozen visitors to the opening night of the community event.

Among those attendees was City of Kamloops Coun. Kelly Hall, who visited the Stìnesten Gallery for the first time. He reflected that the exhibition was “powerful” and expressed hope other community members would visit the show while it was open.

“I love it,” Hall told The Wren about the exhibition, while walking through the gallery. “There’s no place for racism in our community.”

The Stìnesten Gallery is open weekly between 2 and 6 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, as well as from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays.

“It’s been a really, really long journey,” Paul said about the gallery’s anniversary. “Anything grass roots really is.”

Sky Woman’s Influence on Cayuga Artisan

Garlow has walked the trail of being a contemporary Indigenous daughter and matriarch in Turtle Island.

She was raised in the Columbia Basin, and has been influenced by teachings from the Sinixt, Secwepemc, Sylix and Ktunaxa throughout her time in the West Kootenay. 

With lived experience as a runaway, being a young mother and surviving addiction, Garlow has now embarked on her first year as a fine arts student at En’owkin Centre in Penticton and has delivered a collection of artist submissions that explore sexual reclamation as sovereignty and healing, as well as a rejection of violence, as an exhibiting student.

“I’ve lived a lot of lives,” Garlow said. “I’m really fond of this concept that it’s not how many years you’ve lived in a lifetime. Sometimes it’s how many lifetimes you live in a year with flux and change.”

The teachings of Sky Woman have heavily influenced the way Garlow shows up in the world today as an Indigenous artist.

“This exhibition focuses a lot around concepts regarding Sky Woman who is central to the Haudenosau nee teaching and creation of Turtle Island and the planet,” she said about her contributions to the gallery. 

“She was a woman who came down with abundance in her hands and that abundance is all around us. I think that’s one of the poisons of colonization to think that in capitalization that scarcity is where we operate and live and thrive from, and I think, that’s the kind of central juxtaposition of the work.”

According to Garlow, social issues compelled her to create artwork informally to process the world around her, but it became a stronger presence in her life when she started working for the Nelson Museum and Archives in recent years.

“I think art really started for me when I was going to school for social work and I was having a hard time processing some of the emotions that I was feeling during the subject matter so I found creating something and then writing about what I created helped me process some things from it,” she explained.

Her view of the world continues to explore social movements and to highlight the microaggressions that the patriarchy has normalized in current events, such as the 2009 origins of the MMIWG red dresses and the #MeToo movement in 2006. 

“I wanted to explore all of the many different ways that Indigenous women, and women in general, can leave their families or become missing within themselves,” Garlow said. “It’s really close to my heart and it’s part of my lived realities in my 40s now.”

Garlow hopes that Indigenous women won’t continue to be labelled with stereotypes while tackling meaningful discourse about systemic issues.

“I don’t want us, as Indigenous women, to only be seen as victims of violence or in that self-pitying way because we are so abundant and rich and strong and spirited,” Garlow said. “I just hope that one day there will be no more red dresses and no more MeToo movements.”

Reflecting on the origins of Indigenous Resurgence Project in Kamloops feeds future outlook of the gallery

With the Indigenous Resurgence Project and the Stìnesten Gallery celebrating a space that has energized artists through programming and inclusive workshops, Paul believes that there’s been a gradual shift over the last year of service toward serving foot traffic.

“This is a space that was brought together by the artists and it’s energized by the artists,” Paul said. “The programming has a life of its own now. I can feel that in the space. I can feel that when our artists come to participate in the programming and I can feel it in the way people are engaged in the types of activities and workshops that we have here. There is a very palpable sort of energy in the space and that’s because of the artists.”

She felt that showing an artist from another region visiting with a show marked collaboration that is growing beyond the Thompson Okanagan region.

Longtime patron, artist and soon to be on the board of directors Teresa Rush credited the gallery for creating a bustling circle for artists to access low barrier workshops with sliding scale fees.

“It’s just nice to be with like-minded people in a safe environment,” Rush said. “There’s no tolerance for any kind of bullying or anything like that so you know you’re going to be exposed to different people and have an accepting kind of nature to join us because if you don’t, this is not the place for you.”

Paul and Rush are optimistic about obtaining nonprofit status to continuously improve the program’s offerings in the future.