2018 Sobey Art Award : West Coast & Yukon - Jeneen Frei Njootli
CBC Radio | Posted: January 29, 2019 4:31 PM | Last Updated: January 29, 2019
Jeneen Frei Njootli is the 2018 Sobey Art Award finalist representing the West Coast & Yukon
Jeneen Frei Njootli is an artist (Vuntut Gwitchin) and co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective, who has been living and working as an uninvited guest on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, Sto:lo and TsleilWaututh territories for a decade. In her interdisciplinary practice, she uses media such as performance, sound, textiles, collaboration and workshops.
For her recent Media Arts Residency at the Western Front in Vancouver, she hosted a free workshop on how to create and update Wikipedia pages for Indigenous women artists. In 2017, Frei Njootli was the recipient of the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize, and in 2016, she won the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists. After graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2012, Frei Njootli completed her MFA at University of British Columbia in 2017.
Juror's Statement
Melanie O'Brian on Jeneen Frei Njootli
Jeneen Frei Njootli's interdisciplinary practice engages her cultural history and personal experience through performance, sound and installation. Her Gwich'in territory (Old Crow, Yukon) and culture are taken up in her approach to land and social networks, and her work interrogates the histories of her materials, their relationship to trade, ceremony, politics and the body, particularly her own. For example, she has made instruments using caribou bone and antler – animals key to Gwich'in culture and survival – sonifying the materials in performance with contact microphones, which are then played through effects and loop pedals to bring them to life as language. Njootli has written: "As Indigenous peoples, we are tied up in the spectacle of history, not only the Americas, but globally." Her evolving, self-reflexive artistic methodologies critically expand a cultural understanding of this country, and how this spectacle, along with other histories, marks and shapes bodies and traditions.