Living Memories features images by collaborators Asinnajaq and Camille Georgeson-Usher, and Sydney Frances Pickering. Each artist’s work documents performative actions that took place on remote land not easily accessible to large public audiences. These living works are meant to be witnessed over time by those who unexpectedly come across them, inviting the viewer to spend time and to reflect on how structures, documents, and markings are made—and who left them behind. These images convey histories of forced removal, the displacement of peoples, Indigenous placemaking, and the building of temporary structures meant to live and die in nature. Collectively, the images question how we as Indigenous peoples interact with and leave our legacies on the land.

In the image unearthed, Sydney Frances Pickering shares family documents from the Sixties Scoop class action lawsuit authorized by the Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, of which her grandmother and mother were a part. The “Sixties Scoop” refers to the unauthorized and coerced removal of Indigenous children from their families and band without consent, placing them in the foster care system or adopting them into primarily non-Indigenous families. These actions affected many adoptees' sense of cultural identity and created emotional and physical separation between child, parent, siblings, relatives, community, language, and territory.

In unearthed, Pickering alters the legal documents by layering family photographs of her mother as a youth to humanize their officiousness, placing her mother within the same page that sought to permanently sever familial relations. The original document shows the ways in which the English language has been used as a representation of false realities; a tool, a weapon, to carry out the intentions of a system of forced removal and separation between parent and child. These documents and the English language have and continue to be used as a source of power and manipulation against Indigenous peoples and their relationships to family, community and to land.

Asinnajaq and Camille Georgeson-Usher’s collaborative work, this world, here; nesting, shows the construction of a lifesize nest made of grasses, leaves and surrounding flora found in Northern Alberta. Sitting on top of an old railroad track, the nest is big enough for two people to sit comfortably in it, in a pathway beside a small lake that is well-travelled by locals as well as visiting artists for the land-based residency program common opulence that is hosted there. The nest is an invitation to sit listening deeply to the land, to connect profoundly and to witness the stories it has to share with us.