“This exhibit is an ongoing live installation. The primary focus of the installation is intellectual process and using art as a theoretical tool for attending to questions concerning law, conflict, gender, colonialism, and representation.” – Emily Snyder

For three months in the 2013 winter term, Emily Snyder spent Tuesday afternoons in the feminist exhibition space. During those hours, she made work, talked about art with visitors, and thought about the relationship between art-making and the themes of her dissertation project.

A PhD candidate in the Sociology department, Emily’s dissertation research explored and set out to understand representations of gender in Cree legal educational materials. She was interested, in this live installation, to think about the aesthetics of representations, the performance of representations, the use of particular aesthetics, and the socio-legal implications of the representations she examines in this work. This installation includes thinking critically about power and the complexities of indigenous and non-indigenous relations.

Emily made nests, drew birds, painted and wrote on the walls of the exhibition space with sharpie (if you look closely, you might still see what she wrote…).

In the Fall of 2013, Dr Snyder defended her dissertation in Sociology and took up a position as a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow at the University of Victoria.

Conflict/ Power/ Aesthetics ran from January 8 to March 26, 2013.