There’s a buzz around David Campion and Sandra Shields’ installation art exhibit Grand Theft Terra Firma — a buzz you can learn about first hand during an evening presentation at the 2017 BCHF Annual Conference.
Grand Theft Terra Firma: Stories of (Re)conciliation uses text, photography and installation art to reframe the settlement of BC as a complex imaginary video game, one that blends fictional characters with historical facts to push the national conversation around colonial practices and subsequent reconciliation.
The exhibit was recently featured on CBC.ca, and it’s also the focal point of the Friday evening program at the BCHF Annual Conference in Chilliwack May 25-28, 2017.
From 7-9 p.m. on May 26, join us for an evening with Grand Theft Terra Firma artists David Campion and Sandra Shields, who will address questions about how the history of colonization is lived today, by people of both Indigenous and settler ancestry.
This innovative and thought-provoking event is sponsored by the BC Museums Association. Her Honour the Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon will be in attendance.
For information on the conference program, or to register, visit BCHF Annual Conference.
David Campion and Sandra Shields are a husband and wife team motivated by a shared distrust of social mythologies. The photographer-writer couple create photo-text installations that appropriate popular literary forms as a means of disrupting dominant narratives. The mechanics and repercussions of colonization have been a recurring theme for the duo. Much of their recent work is grounded in the space and history of S’ólh Téméxw (the Fraser Valley)—the place they call home. Sandra comes to the subject of colonization as the great-granddaughter of early Alberta settlers. David approaches from the vantage of a recent British immigrant who grew up in southern Africa during the era that saw colonial governments fall. The couple’s work has always explored the creative possibilities of combining words and photographs. Their evolving collaboration has moved progressively away from its documentary roots towards a more conceptually-driven art practice.
