Vancouver Happenings - Tania Willard's Photolithics and BLKNWS

Photolithics 

I went to North Vancouver to check out Tania Willard's exhibit Photolithics at the Polygon Gallery. If you are able to go to North Vancouver to check it out, I highly recommend it. It's available until May 24, 2026. There is a public celebration with the artist on March 29th. 

If you can't go there in person, a cool feature of the website is these sections where it shows a piece of art and then there is audio of the artist speaking to the piece. The artist's spoken words, including her use of Secwépemc language, really brings the work to life. Here is an example of her introducing the exhibit. There are several others here (scroll to bottom of the page). 

The gallery also published a brochure of the exhibit. It is a twenty-two page detailed guide. In the guide, she says:

I am accompanied by dreams of ancestors. In this research I seek to re-awaken these dreams into a reality wherein our people are empowered and our histories are recognized, our land claims are honoured and our belongings and ancestral remains returned. Of course this is a tall order, but it is in faith of the ways in which our work resonates, the metaphysics (Frideres 42) of ancestral knowledge that I place this dream. I like to think that part of our ancestors’ rationale for depositing their knowledge in museums was that they dreamed that one day we, as future grandchildren, would find this knowledge and bring it back. (Willard in Polygon, 2026, p.6). 

I love this idea of viewing oneself as future grandchildren. I also love the connection between dreams and empowerment. In my dissertation I explored Indigenous science fiction as dream space (Grass, 2025, p.102). I think similarly art functions as a dream space too. 

The explanation for one of her pieces, Snowbank and Other Investments, says: 

Accompanying these living processes since the beginning of this decade has been a series of emblematic works entitled Snowbank and Other Investments (2020-ongoing). In the very cold winter of 2019/2020, Willard confronted a large bank of snow outside her home in Secwepemcúĺucw and began to more actively question the substance of conventional banking in this context. She decided to experiment: projecting the words “Indian Land Question” onto the white surface, photographing this, pairing it with another photograph of a hide she was stretching (itself overlayed with the words “Land Bank” in an echo of the rallying cry “Land Back”), trans-mounting the composite image onto Plexiglas, etching diagrams of gem cuts onto that Plexiglas, and further embellishing the results. More such vibrant works would follow. Their proportions and intricacies, as well as the financial terms they carry, evoke banknotes in an altogether new form of currency – one valuing connection to land. Put into circulation inside the main gallery, they announce a future that is as vast as the deep time of her historically and geologically rooted works. This is a future dreamt by Willard’s ancestors. Her determination to “re-awaken these dreams into a reality wherein our people are empowered and our histories are recognized, our land claims are honoured and our belongings and ancestral remains returned” meets us today and becomes a shared process inside her exhibition. (Willard in Polygon, 2026, p11). 

I like the challenge of trying to imagine the futures dreamt of by our ancestors, especially when thinking about what we value and how we assign/express value. 

BLKNWS 

I also recently saw BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions. I didn't take notes because I saw it in theatre. The gist - from memory. The protagonist's father gave her brother a copy of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. The protagonist reflects on the value of such a project and the value of W.E.B Du Bois's work. But she also critically reflects on some of the limitations of his legacy with respect to gender. For example, she notes an event which earned all of the men involved entries in the encyclopedia, but the woman present does not have her own entry. Or, in another example, he interviews a household which is not a nuclear family and fails to see it through a strengths based lens. Within Indigenous scholarship, we too sometimes grapple with the fact that some foundational thinkers within Indigenous studies are both brilliant and flawed. How do we take these figures into the future in a way where we can celebrate their positive impact in such a way that we do not replicate their shortcomings?

At the beginning of the film there is a note to approach the movie as an album and abandon conventional notions of plot. There is a through plot - a journalist on a super cool floating ship which is crossing the Atlantic to bring people from the Americas to Africa. Then there are flashes of documentary-like content, but it's hard to know what is truth and what is fiction. For example, in the film Du Bois goes door to door conducting interviews of black households. That is something which happened. But then there are other side plots which this TIFF article refer to as speculative narrative (Picard, 2025). The speculative narratives are presented as news coverage of things which did not occur. The TIFF article also describes the creation process as an "act of collective fabulation." (Picard, 2025).

I thought the film was visually and conceptually stunning. I will probably watch it again at home sometime. It's available on youtube and itunes. 

Works Cited 

Picard, A. (2025). BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions. Toronto, Ontario: TIFF Lightbox. https://tiff.net/films/blknws-terms-conditions

Polygon. (2026). Tania Willard Photolithics Brochure. North Vancouver, British Columbia: Polygon. https://thepolygon.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Tania-Willard-Only-Available-Light-brochure-1.pdf

*Note - this blog is a sister blog to https://twinkleshappyplace.blogspot.com/