Cannupa: I make things out of anything I can find. I’m excited for you all to engage in this work. Every piece that you see in this exhibition was made in collaboration with other people, entities, environment, history, culture, economics. There’s a tether and a tie to everything that’s been created that pushes forward the idea that the artist as an individual is a myth and we are all dependent upon each other in order to create work, to share work and to experience work and to celebrate work with diverse communities and cultural backgrounds.

Q: Why the she-wolf? How did you come together to select that as the principal symbol of representation of what you wanted to do?

Cannupa: The she-wolf carries this cultural context of the creation of Rome, but also Indigenous perspectives. Our relationship to the she-wolf is one of the few domestications that happened pre-contact, it was the domestication of wolves. We had to become the wolf’s pack as we benefited from the wolf’s strength and senses. There is a coded message in our relationship with dogs that seems a bit more accessible to a western gaze and western audience to describe kinships with more than human species.

Q: What resonates with you and surprises you in these collaborations?

Marie: One thing that is amazing in unpacking and holding these bandanas, thinking of this word, each/other, holding each one, you get a sense of a person being there. It’s standing in for a person. It was embroidered text, but sometimes it was images. A person’s stitch is like a signature or a thumbprint. It’s like a stand-in for their body and it comes in to make this collective piece. One of the things I think is wonderful about this object, this sculpture, is it does get installed in different ways. You see certain bandanas in some locations that you don’t see at another. It keeps repositioning itself within different spaces and that’s part of the story of the bandanas too.

Like a quilt or any kind of collaborative effort of accumulated parts. The messages are on the wolf, check it out. See which ones surprise you. It’s not about me or Marie. It’s about engaging with community.

Q: Cannupa, can you explain the backstory to your piece Every One, a pixelated portrait made through collaboration?

Cannupa: It addresses Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) in Canada – 4,000 women lost. But that number was so round and was a scale hard for me to comprehend. There’s something dehumanizing in the process of creating data. I understand it’s power to create safeguards and protocol and policy change. Having that data is really useful. But we’re also looking at maps of the disappearance of Indigenous women in Canada. The whole thing made me realize that dehumanization is why Indigeous women were brutalized this way. This whole project is built around how do we rehumanize data? The piece Every One is to look at 4,000 plus beads in relationship to that data set. It was built around social media to ask people to make a bead to represent each person in relation to this data. The beads were stained to be the portrait. I was in collaboration with the preparators to help assemble this piece, align the beads and make the portrait pop. It’s really nice to share that process with you all and I appreciate your accomplishment in doing so.

In northern Australia, I met an Aboriginal artist whose paintings were based on her inherited story of The Seven Sisters, which refers to the Pleiades constellation. There are different Seven Sisters narratives here across the United States. In this piece, everything was guided by these stars. It just seemed so right to embroider the Enterprise on this piece. I was thinking about how our relationship to that space is both ancient and modern. Once I leave this place, others will not only gaze and understand our orientation based on these stars but also we’re like custodians of this space.

Cannupa: I think we’re limited by our understanding of science fiction. I’m limited by it and I love science fiction. I listen to audiobooks in my studio. I think Star Trek is an interesting segue in. I like the idea of considering an Indigenous perspective on science fiction and how that challenges even time and the way we engage with it. These stars are really old. Their light will shine into the future and have been shining far into the past. I think it’s interesting to consider science fiction or Indigenous fiction or Indigenous storytelling as a glimpse into science fictions. So much of our cosmology are these beautiful mythical stories with incredible heroes and extremely dangerous enemies. All are built for a metaphor for how to live presently. It’s like good old- fashioned empirical science but embedded in a narrative that has meaning.

Q: This exhibition is very much about the materials that are used. Why is that?

Cannupa: Craft is intergenerational. It’s things passed down from people working with that material from time and memorial. It’s our responsibility to understand this deeper relationship that the material itself becomes a conduit for connection to those who have passed before us. There’s an ancestral knowledge that’s inherent in the materials. It’s a muscle memory older than our own physical body. I find that to be incredibly informative and also incredibly powerful in relationship to transmitting ideas and communication. It’s for future generations and it’s a communication with ancestors that have already passed.