The Potlatch Punk World Tour

Main Gallery:

The Potlatch Punk World Tour
Whess Harman
April 5 – May 31 | 2025
Artist Talk: Saturday – April 5, 2025 | 7-8 PM
Opening Reception: April 5, 2025 | 8-9 PM

The Potlatch Punk World Tour is an exhibition about aspirational spaces and about the communal jubilation of thrashing, smashing and bone-shaking experiences in noise and refusals. Refusals to be silent and refusals to despair in the face of mounting threats against Indigenous, trans and disabled people. There is much work to be done in a world of oppressive forces, and one of those things is remembering who we are; this exhibition includes work from their on-going Potlatch Punk series but also plays with ideas of repetition using readily available printing methods that suggest home reproduction. Through their drawing practice, they have reimagined the gallery as a Indigenous punk venue; a space which embraces and moulds anger into communities that pay attention to one another and share whatever is available to meet one another’s needs.

Artist Bio

b. 1990, Prince Rupert BC
he/they pronouns

Whess Harman is a member of the Carrier Wit’at Nation, a nation amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation and currently resides on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He doesn’t like cops and believes in land sovereignty for Indigenous peoples all across the globe, including Palestine. In his arts practice he works primarily in drawing, text and textiles. As the curator at grunt gallery and occasional editor and contributor to a variety of small publications, he prioritizes emerging queer and BIPOC cultural workers and artists.

While working through many mediums, Whess is often working through ideas of resistance, and works from the foundation of his identity as a queer, trans member of Carrier Wit’at nation living away from his territories. He considers his Indigeneity to be both a cultural and spiritual reality, as well as a political identity. Though he considers many of his projects imperfect, he’s both willing to and does not consider himself exempt from continuing to think and work through these intersections in the hopes of finding a path to liberated futures alongside the many who share rage and despair in the face of the seemingly unrelenting shit-storm of empire building.