Wake Inure Nation
Wendy Peart
Reona Brass
Jen Hamilton
August 9 – 19, 2005
Reception: Thursday, August 11, 8:00pm
Wake Inure Nation is an assessment of the inured nation by three Regina artists; Wendy Peart, Reona Brass and Jen Hamilton. The focus of this explorative project comes partly out of existential concern and suggests, among other things, that there is a connection between identity and influence, individual comfort and collective apathy.
Born in 1966, Reona Brass grew up in Regina and on the Peepeekisis First Nation in Saskatchewan. She studied sculpture/installation and performance art with Ian Carr-Harris and Johanna Householder at the Ontario College of Art and Design and, Indian Fine Art at the SIFC in Regina with Bob Boyer. Brass has shown across Canada, the US and South America since 1993 and has received numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Laidlaw Foundation. She has collaborated extensively and shown at various venues such as The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Le Lieu (Quebec), New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, and at The Museum of Modern Art at the University of Bogota (Columbia). Brass is raising her three children in Regina and also works as a curator, writer, arts administrator, independent producer, speaker, assessor, and community animateur when necessary. She will be presenting her next work for The Institute of American Indian Art (Santa Fe,New Mexico) this October in collaboration with Navajo
poet, Sherwin Bitsui.
Wendy Peart is a Regina based artist who studied at the University of Regina (BFA Visual Arts 1991 and BA Art History 1993) and at the University of Victoria (MFA Visual Arts 1995). She has exhibited throughout Western Canada at various venues such as The Dunlop Art Gallery, Neutral Ground, Rosemont Art Gallery, Art Gallery of the South Okanagan and Open Space Art Society. Additionally to her art practice, Wendy teaches as an instructor at the University of Regina as well as with CARFAC Sask and Learning Through the Arts: Regina Public School Division. Her artwork investigates concepts surrounding the human body as biological mechanism as well as social experience. As an extension of these issues, her work pays attention to the crucial impact that dominant culture executes upon the environment and it begs for a need for knowledge of and connectivity and responsiveness to the Earth, the grandest body in which we all inhabit.
Jen Hamilton grew up in Toronto, studied sculpture/installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and Concordia University in Montreal where she received her M.F.A. in 1996. She moved Regina, Saskatchewan in 1997 to be artist in residence and develop and teach the Intermedia programme at the university. She has done a pile of art residencies, the most recent one (2005) in Huddersfield England. She works collaboratively, and is an independent producer of installations, and technological based art works.
