Hooker Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture: Collective Remembering Mike MacDonald’s Medicine and Butterfly Gardens with Lisa Myers

If we think of land (including waterways) as readable, fluid and ever-changing, living and legible, then changes that move at a high pace and across large areas interrupts legibility.

This paper examines the video installations and Butterfly Garden artwork bythe late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald to think about scale and legibility of land and how his video making informed his garden/artworks planted across the land now known as Canada.

As an artist/curator, my work on MacDonald involves researching former sites of his gardens and collaborative replanting of these spaces with Indigenous artists, collectives and community. I discuss how his gardens are not just a land remediation project; they are spaces of contemplation that re-inscribe symbolic and material tensions and pressures that collide between Indigenous knowledge systems and extractive industries. In considering land as legible, I theorize how MacDonald’s work points to ecological degradation as a kind of redaction yet may function as a reminder of language and plant knowledge.

Lisa Myers is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on her mother’s side and European descent on her father’s side. She is anindependent curator, artist and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University and a York Research Chair of Indigenous Art and Curatorial Practice.

She is currently co-leading an interdisciplinary research project with ecologist Dr Sheila Colla considering wild pollinators, ecology, and art, wherein Myers has focused on the gardens by the late Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald. Myers is working towards a retrospective of MacDonald’s artwork to open at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in the summer of 2022. She has an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University, and is Port Severn and Toronto based.

Lisa Myers is the 2021 Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor, McMaster University. Funding support for Myers walks and lecture include: President’s office, School of the Arts, McMaster Museum of Art, English and Cultural Studies (ECS), Gender Studies and Feminist Research (GSFR), Communication Studies and Multi Media (CSMM), Global Peace and Social Justice and History.

This event will be live streamed. A link will be sent before the event. Following the lecture there will be a live Q&A where audience members will be able to use the chat function to ask questions.

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