Lacie Burning, -attat, 2020, photography and video. Courtesy the artist.

Lacie Burning: -attat

Presented as part of The Pandemic is a Portal
@sfugalleries

Leaning into the nights as we have done for hundreds of years. Wool blankets keep us warm for the incoming cold. We look to the stars in the sky; they are our ancestors watching over us. We watch them and they watch us. It is for these moments of being witnessed and bearing witness that we are afforded an experience of the serene.

Lacie Burning is a Mohawk multidisciplinary artist from the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve. Their work focuses on politics of Indigeneity and identity from a Haudenosaunee perspective through photography, performance and sculpture. They hold a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design with a focus on photography and Indigenous art. In 2019, they won the Renee Van Halm + Pietro Widmer Graduation Award for Visual Arts, were first runner-up for the 2020 Philip B. Lind Prize and longlisted for the New Generation Photography Award for 2020.

[Photograph description: An Indigenous person lying still, serene on concrete. They are wrapped within a red wool patterned blanket, and are wearing a blue sleeveless shirt with leaf patterns. A shoulder tattoo is barely visible. The person has long brown hair fanned out in a lush arc around their head, and have a lower lip piercing. The person peers upward, the sharp shadows of mid-day crossing their face.

[Video description: A 56-second video shot in portrait orientation on a cell phone. The screen is mostly black, punctuated by gold and orange spots, specks of light, and embers that shimmer and waver. At first, it appears like a night sky, the light from each ember vibrates as it waxing and waning over time. The delicate, collective movements of the burning embers create the sensation that the image is of one living, pulsating being, rather than a mass of individual pieces of wood. In the last few moments, one chunk of wood tumbles softly, visible only as it displaces other embers and their glimmers of light wobble.]

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