Biskaabiiyang | Returning to Ourselves

Nico Williams ᐅᑌᒥᐣ, Bingo (Orange) (detail), 2019, 11/0 Japanese glass cylinder beads
Photo credit: Richard-Max Tremblay

Biskaabiiyang | Returning to Ourselves 
Nico Williams

April 14  - September 9, 2023

Biskaabiiyang is an Anishinaabemowin word connoting the process of “returning to ourselves,” which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world.
                                                                                                                                                                         – Grace L. Dillon¹

Nico Williams, ᐅᑌᒥᐣ is Anishinaabe and member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation community and is currently working in Tiohtià:ke | Mooniyang | Montréal. He began experimenting with beadwork in 2015 using Japanese glass Delicas (beads), natural materials and seed beads. He has actively been focusing on the revitalization and evolution of this medium.

“I choose to work with forms and objects that, like beadwork, have an overt—if often overlooked—relationship to gratitude, exchange and commerce, land, and the shaping, morphing ability of language,” Williams says. “Sculptural geometries are a meeting point for technologies, stories, and lineages of knowledge. Translating everyday, accessible objects into beadwork re-presents regular things from our daily lives to reattune us to their attraction and code-switching, overlapping, shifting resonances across cultural contexts and modes of identity. This deep layering of held meaning about the connectivity of the past and present, cross-cultural interweaving, and both the harshness and beauty of our current reality shapes and motivates my practice.”²

Williams is an active member in the urban Indigenous Montréal Arts community, a board member for the Biennale d'art contemporain autochtone (Contemporary Native Art Biennial), and a member of the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. His work has shown internationally and across Canada and has been featured by National Geographic (2018) and CBC (2021) and his work is housed in public collections including Musée des beaux-arts Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Archives Nationales du Québec, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, and the Royal Bank of Canada Art Collection. His first public sculpture, Monument to the Brave, was commissioned in 2020 by the Sick Kids Foundation.

Notes

1. Introduction, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 10.

2. Artist Statement, https://www.nicowilliams.com/aboutnicowilliams

The artist would like to acknowledge the following individuals in the making of Biskaabiiyang | Returning to Ourselves:

Studio Production Manager: Samuel Guertin
The studio team in Tiohtià:ke | Montréal: Molly Chamagne, Ioana Dragomir, Virginie Fillion-Fecteau, Alex Havenne, Christy Kunitzky, Laurel H. Rennie, Lydia Risi, Kuh del Rosario, and Aiden Throne.