March 15 – April 19, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, March 15, 2025, 2 pm to 5 pm
Summer-Harmony Twenish: My Body is the Land
Curator : Amanda Lickers
Galerie Shé:kon
5826, rue St-Hubert, 2nd floor
Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal (QC) H2S 2L7
My Body is the Land is the first solo exhibition by Summer-Harmony Twenish at Shé:Kon Gallery, managed by the Contemporary Native Art Biennale (BACA). Curated by Amanda Lickers, this exhibition will be featured as part of Art Souterrain’s urban satellite route. Summer’s work invites the public to reflect on the theme of habitat, exploring notions of belonging and territory while delving into the connection between land and body sovereignty. The exhibition showcases a visually dynamic body of work that reflects on the complex spectrum of relationality through alluring digital illustration and animation.
Summer’s work engages in queer Indigenous world-building by reflecting on the liminal, the raw, and the ordinary to create an at one sentimental, assertive and empowering body of work. This exhibition emphasizes the interdependance between Indigenous peoples’ self-determination over their territory and autonomy over their bodies. It employs fierce imagery encoded in vibrant color stories that evoke nostalgia for sunsets back home, flooding the gallery with saturated hues of juicy pinks, periwinkle blues, and ethereal violets. With a distinctive and often tongue-in-cheek edge, Summer’s work embodies refusal and resistance to cis-heteropatriarchal normativities and settler narratives that depict the land as an unfeeling object. Grounded in Algonquin sensibilities and visual storytelling, Summer incorporates humor, land-based motifs, and autoethnographic interpretations to create a superlunary landscape.
Summer-Harmony Twenish (she/they) is a queer Algonquin Anishinabe artist from Kitigan Zibi, QC. Though Summer works primarily as a digital illustrator, their interests span mediums, ranging everywhere from digital animation to painting to beadwork and other textile work. Summer’s praxis is rooted in love for their homeland, family stories, and fierce anti-colonial feminist thought. Their work holds space for conversations about mental health, body positivity, queerness, and the importance of challenging settler-colonial expectations in so-called “Canada”.
Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers (Seneca, Six Nations of the Grand River) is an emerging curator and the 2023-2025 Indigenous Land Restitution Research-Creation Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Amanda has worked with museologists, gallery directors, architects, archaeologists and designers to implement Indigenous design principles and decolonize contemporary approaches engaging the built environment – on stolen lands.
Galerie She:kon, which means “hello” in Kanien’kéhà, focuses on showcasing solo exhibitions by up-and-coming Indigenous artists and curators.
