Ice Follies 2014

Bambitchell, An Objecting Odyssey, 2014

The White Water Gallery presents Bambitchell and their project “An Objective Odyssey” for Ice Follies 2014. “Look, there’s no sense pretending history is a goddamn Homeric odyssey” – Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna.

An Objective Odyssey is a site-specific installation on frozen Lake Nipissing using found objects that were historically traded across the water. Employing the style of a contemporary detective fiction, revealing mysterious clues along the way, An Objective Odyssey makes use of these objects in order to playfully interrogate the history of trade and colonization through the waterways of Northern Ontario. This project marks the beginning of a year-long process of research by Bambitchell culminating in an exhibition at White Water Gallery in North Bay.

Artist Bio:

Bambitchell is a collaboration between Toronto-based mixed media artists Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell. Their practice uses queer and feminist frameworks in order to reimagine borders, historical patterns of movement and mobility, labour, migration and memory. These frameworks, often formalized through irony and a camp aesthetic, provoke an invitation to re-think and re-form common understandings of immigration and colonial practices. Bamboat & Mitchell both have independent art practices, and program for Pleasure Dome Experimental Film & Video Collective.

Their works have been exhibited at festivals and galleries such as Mercer Union (Toronto), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlin International Film Festival, Galerie Dazibao (Montreal), and the BFI London Film Festival (UK). Their practice has been the subject of writing in ArtForum, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, and the Routledge published book “Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture”. The duo held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2016-2017), The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, USA (2018) and The Darling Foundry in Montreal, Canada (2019). Bambitchell were long list recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, through the National Gallery of Canada. They currently have a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle).