North Vancouver's Polygon Gallery has now launched the second issue of their unique digital art platform Parallelogram, this time considering the theme of "presence." This exhibition speaks to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure through the innovative and inclusive nature of a free digital platform to access new art.
The second edition of Parallelogram spotlights work that crosses boundaries between film, poetry, and combinations of text and image. This includes work by performer, poet, and artist Deirdre Lee; cultural worker Jacqueline Morrisseau-Addison; writer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist T'uy't'tanat-Cease Wyss; and artist and curator Aaron Rice.
Many of these new commissions come from the Gallery's Response Program, which included Indigenous-led workshops and public screenings of projects by emerging Indigenous filmmakers.
All art included in the digital exhibition is made by Indigenous artists from across territories now called Canada. The artists, in their own ways, approach how digital spaces overlap with unceded and unsurrendered territories that Canadians occupy.
In Deirdre Lee's Existing As a Settler On Unceded Land: A Guide she reflects on what a sincere land acknowledgement might look like. In T'uy't'tanat's Cultural Crossings, the artists considers cultural intersections on the same land.
The work in the second Parallelogram is varied, but each piece and each artist carries with them a consideration of how digital spaces still function as an extension of the same colonial spaces on unceded territories.