Manuel Axel Strain: Xʷəlməxʷ Child

In xʷəlməxʷ child, Manuel Axel Strain draws on Musqueam, Secwépemc, and Syilx ways of knowing, and the discipline of Western psychology. Compositing theories of mind from across their different cultures, Strain imagines the perspective of a child who contemplates the world from beyond these existing frameworks. Through figurative paintings, transformed into pictographs and set against photographic murals, Strain’s work proposes a way of seeing that suspends judgement and challenges divisions such as past and future, old and new, self and other.