Colonial Radio (Excerpt )
1868-2019
Colonial Radio (Excerpt )Installation view, Ignite Gallery, Toronto, May 2019.Medium: Repurposed vintage radio, p5.js, Adafruit Feather microcontroller and Featherwing Musicmaker.Colonial Radio plays a constant drone of racist quotes from Prime Minister John A. MacDonald and Duncan Campbell Scott, who was the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs from 1913 until 1932. The radio has multiple audio tracks that the user can turn the dial to and from. However, they cannot turn down the volume or turn it off.
1868-2019Medium: Hydrocal casting of human hand made with alginate mold, authentic RCMP buttonscast in hydrocal via silicone mold. Resin casting made with alginate mold. Iterations: Fourhydrocal hands, Four Resin hands. I also employed photogrammetry to create a digital renderingof the hand as a backup that could then be 3D printed.The all-white Mountie hand of this piece reaches out from a white wall in a grabbinggesture. The RCMP insignia can be seen on its sleeve coat buttons. A specific model wasselected to be cast for this object based on size and type of hand (large, visibly veined) andintentionally positioned in an aggressive “grabbing” manner. This work is in response to amultitude of events in the RCMP’s history up to the time of this document’s writing. Originallythe North-West Mounted Police, they were formed largely to “tame wild Indian tribes” (Brown40), then throughout the 1900s, the RCMP forcibly removed children from their homes to attendCanada’s infamous Indian Residential School System (LeBeuf, 2011). The mounted police havealso been accused of multiple cases of sexual harassment against female officers (Tunney CBCNews), and in January of 2019, they broke the Wet’suwet’en First Nation checkpoint blockade56(located on Wet’suwet’en land) arresting 14 pipeline protesters (Bellrichard 2019). A videoposted to the CBC’s website shows RCMP officers climbing the barricades, grabbing protestorsand handcuffing them while they lay on their stomachs in the snow. One could argue the pipelinecase is different and more of a political grey area than the black and white of my previoushistorical references, but regardless of the semantics of each scenario, the imagery of thegrabbing hand I use in this work is a use of symbolism that is meant to speak to the present dayas much as the past.
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