Sleepwalking

Charlene Vickers' installation Sleepwalking is an act of reclamation. It consists of twelve chairs facing each other in a circle, on each chair a blanket and atop each blanket a pair of hand made moccasins carefully constructed out of cardboard beer cases. On the back of each chair above the moccasins sits a single photo work. In Sleepwalking Vickers reclaims a history and a culture - her own. Adopted by a white family she grew up outside the culture. She remembers a pair of beaded moccasins displayed on the wall in their home - as out of place from the culture that produced them as she was.

Curator Daina Warren wrote for the inaugural opening of this work:

"Yet the reference to tradition through the form of the moccasin itself and materials such as leather and beads anchor the work in the historic past. Adding another layer to her Anishinabe history, Charlene makes an immediate and personal claim on the footwear, fabricating her own identity into the moccasins by measuring and assuring that each pair of moccasins fit her own feet." (1)

The making of the moccasins was an act of Vicker's claiming a history she has never known. She learned beading and moccasin making through trial and error. She found moccasin designs on the internet, native craft traditions being serviced by new technologies. She says it would have been easier if there had been someone to teach her. Sleepwalking is her attempt to create a history for herself and acknowledge native culture as it exists today.

Then there are the chairs, blankets and photo works. Each chair and blanket is different; old, each one showing its history. The photos have been carefully selected. Some are personal photos of the artist, some historical and others reconstituted into artworks by the artist. These photos lay out a history, at once personal and general of the ongoing colonialization of indigenous people in Canada. Each chair and worn blanket with individual design and age takes on a personality of its own.

The works seem strangely muted. There is no conversation between them. The pictures tell us one narrative but the moccasins themselves seem to tell another. On first glance they're humorous but then they become too real to be humorous. A sadness slowly exudes from them and the story of lost lives in colonialism emerges. These chairs and objects show the wear of a life hard lived. The pictures of the artist's past bespeak a reality that goes beyond autobiography and speak to the wider history of native bodies under 500 years of colonialism. In this installation the wear of those traumatic 500 years is evident.

Each of these chairs wears it with a dignity and a pride that while muted is not powerless. The silence of these works is deafening. Each chair sits waiting for its elder to sit in it but there are no elders here. Vicker's belongs to a generation of natives that have had to find their own elders; had to raise themselves into the culture that was stolen from them.

Within Native communities the phrase "All my relations" is evoked to make the speaker and those present realize that each of them carries the wider responsibility of their families both living and dead and these elders have given them insights they would not otherwise have. Yuxweluptun has suggested that it is the defining phrase that separates indigenous people from the rest of us. While Europeans define ourselves through Descartes (I think therefore I am) stressing our individuality within the universe indigenous people define themselves through "all my relations" reconfirming their connections in the universe.

Sleepwalking is an attempt to provide a space for those elders. When they show up there will be a chair to sit in, a pair of moccasins to keep their feet warm and a blanket for their shoulders or their knees if they get cold. Sleepwalking emerges out of a traumatic past but speaks to a future where all the chairs will be full and everyone will be speaking at once. But that time is not now. Meanwhile these chairs sit in wait, silent yet still telling their story.

(1) Quoted from Two Many Tribulations Charlene Vickers and Judy Chartrand, a brochure published by grunt gallery at the inaugural exhibition of Sleepwalking from September 9 to October 2, 2004 and curated by Daina Warren. ISBN # 1-895329-66-3

Glenn Alteen
February 2006