Rolande Souliere

In this sidewalk tour linking CAG, Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and the artist’s wrapped bus, Rolande Souliere speaks about the three interrelated projects comprising her solo exhibition and her contribution to *How far do you travel?*



Transcript_RolandeSouliereinConversationWithKimberlyPhillips.pdf

Exterior image of the Yaletown-Roundhouse station façade covered in a pattern of vinyl rhombus and triangle shapes. Each shape contains patterns of alternating red, white, black and yellow rhombuses. 

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Talk

The multi-media practice of Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere entangles the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with that of contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. Her solo exhibition, *Frequent Stopping IV and V*, presents two new large-scale, site-specific works across the street level façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery and offsite at the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. These installations draw from Souliere’s ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive installations. 

Souliere has a long history of working with the materials and metaphors of the road. She strips these seemingly universal symbols from their usual contexts and separates them from their role as wayfinding aids to suggest the extent to which authorities dictate our movements on the land. The *Frequent Stopping* series points to the ways in which our perception of boundaries shift according to perspective and to the fact that so many Indigenous land claims — despite being first pressed decades or even centuries ago — have yet to be resolved. Especially in Vancouver, which sits upon the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Souliere’s ultra-visible, highly public interventions mark space in a gesture that speaks of permanent visibility and reclamation. They delineate lines that cannot be drawn and redrawn.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare


### Biography

Rolande Souliere is a member of the Michipicoten First Nation, born in Toronto, Canada and currently living in Sydney, Australia. In 2017 she received a PhD from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. A selection of Souliere’s international solo exhibitions include *Form and Content*, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe (2018); *Coyote Responds: I Like America and America Likes Me*, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Sydney Non Objective (2015); *CrossRoads*, Urban Shaman, Winnipeg (2011); and *Materiality and Otherness*, grunt gallery, Vancouver (2008). Recent group exhibitions include *niigaanikwewag*, Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); *Language as Puncture*, Gallery 101, Ottawa (2017); the cross-Canada touring exhibition *Beat Nation* (2012-2014); the Australia-wide touring exhibition Alterbeast (2014);  Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto (2010); and *Point of Origin*, Artspace, Sydney (2008). Her public art commissions include *Bringing Back Wabakinine* (2015) in the Bala Underpass, Toronto and the recently completed *Mediating the Treaties* (2017-18) at Air Canada Park in Winnipeg, commissioned by the Winnipeg Art Council.

ProgramGuideSpring2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideRolandeSouliere.pdf

Transcript: Rolande Souliere in Conversation with Kimberly Phillips

An image detail of black-and-yellow caution tape layered in horizontal striations. To the left, there is a single vertical strip of red-and-white caution tape.

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Exterior image of CAG with red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across the ground floor façade windows. The tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes, covering each window.

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An image detail of red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across CAG’s ground floor façade windows. The caution tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes. 

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Frequent Stopping IV and V

Throughout 2019, the Contemporary Art Gallery is producing a major public art initiative in partnership with TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority. Five Canadian artists — Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen and Anna Torma — were commissioned to graphically wrap the exterior of a series of articulated buses traveling on major routes throughout Vancouver. The nature of this project — public transit vehicles enveloped by visual imagery and traversing the space of the city — offers a lyrical opportunity to explore connections between images, meaning and movement. Buses and trains are not the only transit systems that we navigate in our everyday lives: visual images constantly transport ideas and meaning from one place to another. They link and organize histories, spaces and identities. They connect us with others. The English word commute is derived from the Latin *commutare*, which means to change or transform. Each of the five artists featured in this project has an artistic practice that is deeply attentive to the commute of visual language across time and space. This project asks “how far do you travel?”, a question that could well be posed to each rider on the bus, but also to the graphic imagery that Achjadi, Cruz, Souliere, Taşdelen and Torma use to interrogate how and why images move and communicate through time and place.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

This project is produced in partnership with TransLink.

ProgramGuideWinter2019.pdf

A graphic pattern made up of a purple, blue and green geometric background with various illustrations of buildings, swirling clouds, imaginary birds and plants superimposed on top.

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus that is wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The vinyl pattern is made up of a purple and blue geometric background with various illustrations superimposed on top.

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus that is wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The vinyl pattern is made up of a plain pink background with abstract illustrations of various forms and shapes. 

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The imagery on the vinyl resembles blueprint-like geometric shapes, composed of thin white lines on a dark blue background. 

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus that is wrapped in a patterned vinyl. The vinyl pattern is made up black pictographic imagery on a white background.   

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An image of the exterior of a transit bus wrapped in patterned vinyl. The pattern is composed of road work caution tape, with arrow-like shapes alternating from yellow and black to red and white.

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Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen, Anna Torma

How far do you travel?

Diyan Achjadi
*The catch of a tiger*, 2019
silkscreen on paper
8.75 x 8.75 inches
Edition of 250 in four variations
Unframed

Diyan Achjadi’s artistic practice is concerned with print media’s fundamental role in the transit of knowledge throughout the world. Her work is a critical response to the cross-cultural influences, contaminations and fantastical imaginings that result from the colonial project. For many years she has been interested in how the decorative arts — particularly wallpapers, textiles and ceramics — are presumed to be innocent, ornamental backdrops to social life, but contain politically potent imagery that serves to perpetuate powerful assumptions around gender, race and nationhood. Extending from Achjadi’s participation in CAG’s major public art initiative, *How far do you travel?*, presented in partnership with TransLink aboard Vancouver buses throughout 2019, *The catch of a tiger* presents a swirling, riotous reconfiguration of traditional Chinoiserie plate design that depicts an imagined Indonesia — its landscapes, architecture and fauna, which with Achjadi’s deft printmaking skills seep outside their borders and boundaries.


Rolande Souliere

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