Janet Rogers and Jackson 2Bears – For This Land: Inside Elemental

The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film and the Durham Art Gallery are pleased to co-present For This Land: Inside Elemental. Artists Janet Rogers and Jackson 2Bears of 2Ro media created a work of monumental importance on their home territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River. This work was originally conceived and installed as a two-channel installation and performance, bringing the viewer into an immersive, ghostly landscape, haunted by memories and spiritual understanding of place; a visceral encounter that its online presentation can only hint at.

Because of the pandemic, the exhibition is now re-conceived for audiences beyond Durham. For This Land: Inside Elemental can now be experienced as an intimate encounter at home, a new way of listening and seeing the work, perhaps opening up a space for even deeper reflection.

“Inside Elemental is an exploration of the internalization of one’s traditional territory, and in general about how our external environments are deeply intertwined with identity, self-understanding and the interiority of personal and collective experience. Everything is inside; everything outside can be accessed and interpreted as performative storytelling under the sign of what Leroy Little Bear called ‘natural laws of interdependence’ when referring to the living archive of land-based narratives. With this project we offer sky, sunlight, moonlight, wind and stars from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, bringing these stories from the land into the gallery in the form of an immersive multi-digital installation.”
– Janet Rogers and Jackson 2Bears

The Festival and Gallery are located in Durham, West Grey, on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. In recognition of the Elders who were sent from Saugeen to the Mush Hole, the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film has commissioned a creative response to For This Land: Inside Elemental from Sharon Isaac, filmmaker and community artist from Saugeen First Nation. Coming soon to the Durham Art Gallery’s exhibition webpage will be a written text shedding light on the reverberations of memory across internal and external territories and beyond the architecture of a place.

We invite you to view the online exhibition at the Durham Art Gallery website here. For further information, please contact Debbie at debbie.ebanks@gmail.com.

For This Land: Inside Elemental runs until August 20, 2020.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Please note: the 2020 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film is cancelled due to COVID-19. Miigwetch/Thank-you/Merci to all who have supported us all these years. We hope to gather in 2021!