Portrait of Greg Staats,

Portrait of Greg Staats, #GGArts2024 winner

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Greg Staats is a 2024 winner of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Video directed by David Hartman.

A presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.

The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm’s-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) “to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.”

For more information, visit: https://en.ggarts.ca

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Transcript:

I mean, it’s so joyful to think that what I’m learning now can actually be used in the future.

Even if they are images without words, they’re images that come from the language.

Well, photography started in high school, and I suddenly realized that I could navigate relationships, social relationships, with a camera quite easily. And so, I took on this role as a photographer.
Visiting and this idea of documenting those visits became important to me.

Photography has provided me with an ongoing reciprocity to land, nation, language, community, family and finally to myself.

I’ve been in a constant state of reflection for some time with my photography. And it’s a sort of counter-veiled, dissociative state.

It’s in terms of letting what I’ve come to learn as Indigenous intuition breathe, and collect images that reflect metaphors, mnemonics, symbols of our ceremonial lives. You know, you just sort of take an inventory of your memory of the place itself and then you start having a relationship with the land itself. Like I start photographing the 300-year-old trees where I grew up. And I constantly kept taking photographs. And it was like visiting old friends.

And once the spiritual part of my person started to develop, and once I started to encourage myself to pass beyond those barriers that had been put up for me by Christianity, then everything really did feel like I was visiting ancestors.

It was a true reciprocity.

My goal, it’s all been moving towards becoming a full member and crossing the threshold of the longhouse.

It’s that embrace, that cultural embrace.

If you have something in your language that refers to place and you don’t have your language, then you require someone else to assist you, a knowledge keeper, to define that place from that language. And then you have to seek out that place in the real world.

#GGArts2024 #GregStaats #CanadaCouncil

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