Suggesting an alternative to colonial histories of Lake Ontario, collaborators Gwen MacGregor and Lourdes combine footage of tall ships and tidal waves in Unsettled Waters. Throughout the film, the lake exercises its own agency, pushing back against the ships’ intrusions, and overturning romantic narratives of exploration.
Biographies:
Gwen MacGregor: Gwen MacGregor is a Toronto artist with an extensive body of work in installation, video, photography and drawing. Her work is in a number of collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries, Artbank, and the Royal Bank Collection. She is represented by MKG127 in Toronto. MacGregor is also a cultural geographer and is currently pursuing a PhD at U of T. Her dissertation is on the relationship between constructions of citizenship and nationhood and how this is both represented and contested in contemporary art. She has a forthcoming chapter on Nuit Blanche coming out in the publication Geographies of Urban Public Art published by Ashgate.
Lourdes Duniam: Lourdes Duniam is an artist, community organizer, and student currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Integrated Media program at OCAD University. A native of Abya Yala (name used by the Panamanian Kuna people to refer to the American continent, meaning “land of vital blood”), they have been calling Turtle Island home since 2002. Their work as an artist explores themes of coloniality and the decolonial option, with a particular focus on the introspective scrutiny of their experiences as a gender non-conforming, queer person of colour with Afrolatinx and Indigenous roots. Their work aims to create sites of resistance and empowerment, exposing and seeking to dismantle the interlocking systems of oppression that strive to disempower marginalized, racialized, and sexualized bodies.