Artist Talk – Interwoven Narratives: Identity and Place

Dayna Danger, Kinship Masks, 2021

Interwoven Narratives: Identity and Place

September 27, 2025, 1 – 4pm
Royal Canadian Geographical Society
Tickets: $10

Join us for an in-depth artist talk featuring Dayna Danger, Barry Pottle, Leslie Reid, and Nico Williams—four artists whose practices offer powerful meditations on identity, land, and cultural continuity across Inuit, Métis-Saulteaux-Polish, Anishinaabe, and settler perspectives. Art becomes a site for both resistance and healing—a way to make visible the stories and experiences that are often overlooked or erased.

Nico Williams, Dirty J Cloth, 2022

Dayna Danger and Nico Williams, in particular, engage with gender and sexuality through the lens of Indigenous resurgence and material knowledge. Danger’s large-scale portraits and performance-based work center Two-Spirit, transgender, and non-binary kin, using symbolism drawn from BDSM and kink communities to interrogate power, visibility, and consent. Their work challenges colonial projections and affirms complex, embodied identities through collaborative, process-based methods. Williams, whose sculptural beadwork practice is both contemporary and community-focused, transforms geometric abstraction into a site of cultural continuity and innovation. Active in urban Indigenous networks and pedagogy, his work bridges traditional knowledge and cutting-edge form, often in dialogue with collective practices and public space.

Barry Pottle, Coco Canal

Barry Pottle’s photographs document the lived experience of being an Urban Inuk in Ottawa—a reality underrepresented in the national imagination. His work captures the intimacy of cultural gatherings, urban life, and quiet moments in nature, asserting the presence and vitality of Inuit communities beyond the North. Leslie Reid, working from a settler perspective, explores the atmospheric and psychological impact of Arctic landscapes, bearing witness to both the beauty and fragility of Northern environments affected by colonial histories. They will be discussing New Topographies, their most recent exhibition together.