robgillthings

Warbler’s Roost, South River, in association with NAISA

July 29-31, 2016

Artscape Studio/Gallery Tour, South River

click image to go to event

June 20-26 – traffic light box at corner of Old Kingston Road and Military Trail

through the StreetARToronto program

click image to go to page

“Dissent was also a normal and a critical part of decision-making processes in all levels of social organization. A plurality of individual truths within a common context provided people with the ability to express themselves and their opinions in a way that simultaneously protected the experience of the individual within the consciousness of the collective. In this way, individual dissent could easily and respectfully be encoded within Indigenous political and intellectual traditions. The oral traditions of Indegenous nations are rich with stories of a single dissenting being, influencing and mobilizing the masses…hearing and considering the opinions of others, even when they differ from those of the collective, is important because often important interventions come from people close to the spiritual world – women, the elderly and children – coming to us through dreams, visions, and ceremony.”

“This is a movement, a mobilization, and a migration towards continuous rebirth…This movement in Nishnaabeg thought is expressed through the structure of the language, which utilizes verbs to a far greater extent than nouns. In the pre-colonial daily life of Nishnaabeg people, movement, change and fluidity were a reality. Family groups and clans travelled cyclically throughout their territories based on the thirteen moons of the year, the seasons and their knowledge of cyclical change in the natural world. At certain times of the year, clans would gather for governance, ceremonies and social activities. Leaders emerged as issues did. Society and clan structure expanded and contracted like a beating heart, or working lungs. Centralized government and political structures are barriers to transmotion; this static state is never experienced in nature. Aligned with the natural word, Nishnaabeg people created political, intellectual, spiritual and social lifeways that enabled them to align themselves individually and collectively with the life forces of their territories.”

Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, pp. 88, 89

“As we have just seen, similar psychopathic phenomena are found almost throughout the world.
That such maladies nearly always appear in relation to the vocation of medicine woman is not at all surprising. Like the sick woman, the religious woman is projected onto a vital plane that shows her the fundamental data of human existence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surrounding world. But the primitive magician, the medicine woman, or the shaman is not only the sick woman; she is, above all, a sick woman who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing herself. Often when the shaman’s or medicine woman’s vocation is revealed through an illness or an epileptoid attack, the initiation of the candidate is equivalent to a cure.”

“But the future shaman is cured in the end, with the help of the same spirits that will later become her tutelaries and helpers.”

Mircea Eliade ‘Shamanism’ pp. 27-28

[click above image to go to more awesomeness]

Great New Frogs

Artscape Gibraltar Point

After eighteen years, I have used every resource available to me to get to this point. Click image for project page.