IN HOW CAN YOU EXPECT ME TO RECONCILE, WHEN I KNOW THE TRUTH? a work that grapples with the Canadian Indian residential school system, dry transfer letters spell out “debwewin.” The word, which means truth in Anishinaabemowin, is positioned slightly back from the installation, which is assembled from sourced antique apparatuses and materials, including what resembles a yoke, its lopsidedness connoting an unequal tethering. Barry Ace has added pulleys that could be viewed as “representing the scales of justice or injus-tice.” Thick nautical hemp rope runs the length from one side to the other descending into a pile on the right, on the left knotting around a small form. The concealed shape underneath the gauze is a cradleboard, a vessel used in many First Nations to carry babies and called a tikinagan in Anishinaabemowin.

The work was created during a residency for Ontario College of Art & Design University’s (OCADU) Nigig Residency in January 2018, an initiative of the Indigenous Visual Culture Program at OCADU. It travelled to Stockholm, Sweden as part of the group exhibition PUBLIC DISTURBANCE: Politics and Protest in Contemporary Indigenous Art from Canada. Curated by Ottawa’s Galerie SAW Gallery for the Supermarket 2018 Stockholm Independent Art fair, the location where the work was installed was in a slaughterhouse in Slakthusomrädet, the Meatpacking district of Stockholm. It was also exhibited as part of Art + Law Indigenous Artist in Residence Program, a partnership between the Arts Council Windsor & Region, the University of Windsor Faculty of Law and School of Creative Arts that coincided with the 2018 World Indigenous Law Conference Waawüatanong Zübi: Where the River Bends, The Application of Indigenous Laws in Indigenous Communities and in the Courts,

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