Surrey Art Gallery announces Zachery Cameron Longboy: Guardian of Sleep, a dreamlike video art installation
Longboy places his multiple identities as a white-adopted/Native gay/Two-Spirit/Sixties Scoop survivor at the centre of his multidisciplinary practice
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Zachery Cameron Longboy, Guardian of Sleep, 2022, video still.
Surrey Art Gallery invites people to experience a dream-like, layered video art installation. Zachery Cameron Longboy: Guardian of Sleep runs from August 6 to November 26. Admission is free.
Opening reception takes place September 17 from 6:30 to 9 pm. Thursday Artist Talk is on November 3 from 7:30 to 9 pm.
Longboy is a Churchill, Manitoba-born, Vancouver-based video maker and performance/installation artist of Sayisi Dene lineage. He places his multiple identities as a white-adopted/Native gay/Two-Spirit/Sixties Scoop survivor at the centre of his multidisciplinary practice.
Morphing animations reminiscent of petroglyph drawings, running packs of caribou, and footage of the baton-twirling artist leading a parade out of the forest make up some of the imagery in Guardian of Sleep, Longboy’s video installation born from a dream.
Zachery Cameron Longboy.
Like dreams themselves, this digital diary collage of found and filmed footage, performance, and animations manipulate, twist, and transform into each other. Longboy sees dreams as ways of putting things together and are to be guarded. Guardian of Sleep encourages viewers moving into Longboy’s dream to think of their own messages coming to them through this medium. What did last night’s slumber tell you?
Created completely on his iPhone, this work is the latest in Longboy’s video and performance-based arts practice spanning from the ’90s to present, which references the artist’s layered experiences of identity. Longboy questions gender norms and considers the relationship between our environment and the health of individuals and communities.
“This video installation speaks to having pride in one’s identities and to survival, community, and joy,” says Alanna Edwards, curator of Guardian of Sleep and Surrey Art Gallery’s education and engagement coordinator. “Longboy thoughtfully brings together imagery, sculptural elements, and sound in a collage-like experience—reminders to be true to ourselves and of the interconnectedness of our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.”
Zachery Cameron Longboy, Guardian of Sleep, 2022, collage.
The September 17 opening reception for Zachery Cameron Longboy: Guardian of Sleep will also celebrate the Surrey Art Gallery’s other fall exhibits: video-based artwork in Poets with a Video Camera and Henry Tsang: Tansy Point; two multimedia exhibits that speak to the plurality of visualizing Blackness in Concealed Cultures and I see; I breathe; I am!; the colourful vinyl murals Echoes by Atheana Picha and It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see by Sandeep Johal; paintings in Fraser Valley Chapter Presents: Fresh Paint! and mixed media in Surrey Art Teachers Association: Connect.
Longboy is nationally honoured and widely shown in queer and First Nations venues, as well as in public collections at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Glenbow Museum (Calgary), and The Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa). Numerous screenings include The Edmonton Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), and Images Festival. His intensely felt, hybridly layered videos often use his complex performance-installations as a departure point.
For more information, see Surrey Art Gallery.
Post sponsored by Surrey Art Gallery.