Resonant Bodies explores the intersections of displacement, reconnection, and the inherent animacy of more-than-human beings. Naomi Watkins is from the Secwépemc nation, from BC’s southern interior. Their work challenges anthropocentric perspectives on belonging, aiming to spark critical dialogue regarding identity, revealing that our sense of place is a collaborative experience shaped by both human history and the living landscapes we inhabit.

To encounter the contemporary Indigenous experience through the lens of a two-spirit Secwépemc artist raised away from unceded homelands is to confront the geography of proximal displacement. In this exhibition, spatial dislocation is not merely charted along the asphalt highway connecting the urban sprawl of Vancouver to the inland rivers of Kamloops; it resides in the subtle, enduring friction between presence and absence, ancestral memory and diaspora.

Watkins reflects, “While working with these cedar beings, I became more and more attentive to the offcuts and natural forms that emerged from carving, noticing that they seemed to speak for themselves when I worked alongside them rather than carving something representational. This became part of a larger process of figuring myself out and returning to the stories and relationships that shaped me while growing up away from my nation. Through these gestures, I have found an intimate threshold that I want to linger within–a space where I can consider proximity, displacement and belonging while being generative and careful.

These works are an attempt to remain open to that learning and to the ancestral stories resting within cedar grain, moving through green-hued lakes and carried across each limb of sand. In this way, Resonant Bodies offers a continued gesture outward: a call to keep listening, keep learning and keep returning to the relationships that make this connection and care possible.”