Online: April 11 to May 22, 2025

Mixed media and sculpture in the Mezzanine

Colonial Layers is a sculptural, mixed media investigation of graphic recording as a colonial act.

This exhibition is comprised of engraved panels and boxes incorporating aerial survey photos gathered during my artist’s residency in Tuktoyaktuk, NWT in September 2023. These 1:250,000-scale photographs document the Arctic Ocean shore, from the Mackenzie Delta to Prudeau Bay. These prints contain handwritten notes and tracings from a post-war sovereignty survey. I introduce an additional layer of collaged, hand drawn, tinted and noted information, emphasizing and altering, redirecting or challenging the earlier, underlying claims.

The renderings on the box exteriors are based on the lines of a Mackenzie Delta kayak collected by Knud Rasmussen in 1923/24 and documented by David Zimmerley in 1973. They too are altered, adjusted, corrupted, edited and repurposed by me.

The graphic languages of photography, cartography and engineering and computer rendering that are combined in these works were originally used to exert or assert control of territory, resources and material culture. Each layer is on top of the other, outside or inside the box. The viewer’s inability to fully engage with the entirety of the work at once echoes the core challenge of privilege: the impossibility of simultaneously knowing self and other.

Website: robertmorris.ca

Opening Reception

April 4 • 7 pm to 9 pm • 1120 Brunette Avenue, Coquitlam

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