Different Grounds (2021)

Manuel Axel Strain

Aberdeen Canada Line Station

Area: City Centre
Location: South plaza at base of concrete column.

This Artwork is no longer on display

Materials: Photography

Program: Unique Programs
Ownership: Civic
Sponsored By: City of Richmond

Description of Work

Digital prints of photographs on semi-translucent vinyl.

Artist Statement

This work asserts the presence of the Indigenous body to uplift and honour the various understandings and experiences of Indigenous people and their relationships to the ground we all walk upon. In the image wrapped around the leg are flagging tape, their fathers old deconstructed yellow vest and tourniquets. Flagging tape is used to wrap around trees, often used within the forestry and resource extraction industry, tourniquets are handed out with harm reduction for intravenous drug use to be wrapped around arms. The materials used to wrap the limbs stand to witness the ways in which colonial capitalist modes of extraction are intertwined with Indigenous bodies and land sovereignties.

Strain honours the resiliency of Indigenous people and holds space for the spirits of resistance. Strain often creates artworks in collaboration with their relatives. This connection to kin is a source of agency that flows through their art practice, as they work with the land and across performance, painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound and installation. References to the artist’s lived experiences emerge in their artworks, tackling subject matter like resource extraction, gender, Indigenous medicine, Indigeneity, labour and Strain’s ancestral and community ties to the land. They have exhibited work in Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver, and have shown work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, as well as at more distant places across Turtle Island. Strain attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, but prioritizes Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and ancestors.