Celeste Pedri-Spade
News
I am honoured and excited to be selected as a participating artist in Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto 2020 this June. Below is a preview of the wearable art series, Material Kwe, which I will be debuting during this International Indigenous Exhibition.
"For many, the fashion arts have always been an active and vibrant site of cultural exchange—a place where people with different stories, from different places, come together to explore and negotiate their position in the world. While this is true, for Anishinabeg, the fashion arts is also deeply embedded in a history of destruction, appropriation and gendered violence. The beginning of settler-Anishinabeg contact within my family’s traditional lands was based on resource extrapolation for European colonial male fashion (e.g. beaver pelts for hats). By creating wearable art pieces, I will press back against this material HIStory. Each design will challenge me to integrate Anishinabe designs and materials with early colonial women’s fashion design and
materials which will culminate into Material Kwe, six wearable art ensembles that re-visit and re-imagine an alternate “herstory”--one that privileges the strength and resilience of our women. Material Kwe will invite people to think through this HIStoried past. In order to move towards something other than colonialism, we need to encounter it in the present, making the present connect to the past. But I also think we need more than that. We need to imagine and fashion something radically different. It is my hope that Material Kwe creates a space for this creative, decolonial work." - Celeste Pedri-Spade
"For many, the fashion arts have always been an active and vibrant site of cultural exchange—a place where people with different stories, from different places, come together to explore and negotiate their position in the world. While this is true, for Anishinabeg, the fashion arts is also deeply embedded in a history of destruction, appropriation and gendered violence. The beginning of settler-Anishinabeg contact within my family’s traditional lands was based on resource extrapolation for European colonial male fashion (e.g. beaver pelts for hats). By creating wearable art pieces, I will press back against this material HIStory. Each design will challenge me to integrate Anishinabe designs and materials with early colonial women’s fashion design and
materials which will culminate into Material Kwe, six wearable art ensembles that re-visit and re-imagine an alternate “herstory”--one that privileges the strength and resilience of our women. Material Kwe will invite people to think through this HIStoried past. In order to move towards something other than colonialism, we need to encounter it in the present, making the present connect to the past. But I also think we need more than that. We need to imagine and fashion something radically different. It is my hope that Material Kwe creates a space for this creative, decolonial work." - Celeste Pedri-Spade
"Anti-Pipeline Society Kwe" C. Pedri-Spade, 2019. Photo credit: Linda Roy
|
“Long Live the Matriarch!” C. Pedri-Spade, 2019. Photo Credit: Linda Roy
|
 Dr. Celeste Pedri-Spade
Image courtesy of Laurentian University
Boozhoo! Anag Oniimiiwin Nnidishinikaz! Mukwa Dodem!
I introduce myself to you in Anishinabemowin. I am an Anishinabekwe (Ojibwe) from northwestern Ontario and a band member Lac Des Milles Lacs First Nation. Every day I embrace many roles and the responsibilities that go along with them. I am a researcher, artist, mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, niece, and community member. In my work, research and everyday life, I am passionate about demonstrating how my culture and art are valuable ways of knowing and experiencing the world and instrumental to living a good life. |
Dr Pedri-Spade with her grandmother Shirley and husband Rob Spade at the annual Shakopee powwow 2018
|