IBC (Indian Brand Corporation): Dystopic Autonomy

Joseph Tisiga’s series of watercolours references the Kaska Dene folk legend of Dzohdié’, who killed a giant man-eating worm with a bow and arrows he saw in a dream made for him by his grandmother. Reinterpreting the legend in paved car lots, public parks, cramped dioramas, and spray painted on cinderblock walls, Tisiga’s work hinges on the corruptible histories that inform his identity by confronting a distinctly alive and nonhuman force that is out there in the world. Astroturf makes an appearance. Transmissions of proxy occur. And the casualties of heuristics are revealed.

Reframing and parodying familiar tropes of colonial iconography under the banner of the fictional “Indian Brand Corporation,” IBC: Dystopic Autonomy moves between depictions of scenes from the Dzohdié’ legend and illustrations of the banal social apparatus that structure human relationships with the state, the built environment, and colonial extraction economies, troubling the fragile boundaries between human and nonhuman beings. Pulling entire landscapes into surreal moments of alienation, magic, and the mundane, Tisiga confronts colonial painting traditions (and their treatment of Indigenous lands and bodies) with deep narrative complexity, dreaming mythologies that reveal strange, new, and unconventional ways of relating.