Ubiquitously Refined: A Review of Eye Eye by Krista Belle Stewart

The Teck Gallery at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre is home to a lounge area overlooking the waterfront. Multiple individual seats are available here, each equipped with their own lecture style desk. Doubling as both a lounge area and an art gallery, the two walls perpendicular to the window currently display two components of an installation derived from the earth in Douglas Lake, British Columbia, Indigenous visual artist Krista Belle Stewart’s homeland. These fixtures expand to cover the entire wall of the gallery, and their presence remains firm and mundane, which is further emphasized in the site of installation. Even when the viewer is not aware of this installation or its purpose, a solemn sort of connection is engaged.

Eye Eye is an installation by Krista Belle Stewart and curated by Melanie O’Brian. The title of the work itself is an Okanagan phrase that means “one is present”. It consists of two components: the first, located on the left side from the entrance, is a square array of 25 by 25 tiles, each roughly 5 inches by 7 inches and spaced only half an inch apart from each other. These 625 tiles, along with the second component, a large painted canvas, emphasize the correlations between Indigenous people and their land in conjunction with its resistance to colonial practices.

The 625 tiles of Eye Eye as seen in the Teck Gallery lounge.

 

As a whole, Eye Eye’s meaning of “being present” is prominently reflected by its location. The work is displayed in the most accessible of the SFU galleries and its double function as a lounge space means viewers have some sort of direct interaction with Eye Eye even if they are not fully invested in observing it. While this can be said about almost any installation in the Teck Gallery due to the location’s convenience, Eye Eye, in particular, suggests that the work is intended to solely be present and that its viewers, regardless of their intentions, share that presence. Using the earth as a medium inverts its use from ordinary ground that is walked and laid upon to a visible influence of nature surrounding the gallery’s occupants. By breaking up the earth into smaller tiles, Stewart exposes the diversity of the single medium as well as its fragility. The tiles may be similar, but they are not identical, and their fixation to the wall causes them to fragment and break off due to the exposure.

A close-up of the tiles.

Previously, Stewart’s use of the earth as a medium involved the 2017 performance “Potato Gardens Band”, in which the land was explored sonically through contact microphones, along with exposing the earth by holding it in particular vessels like buckets. By exposing the land in such methods, Stewart is insisting for us to gaze upon this land and take in its history, tensions and relationships with land between Indigenous people and the colonial systems they resist. While Eye Eye may remain nothing more than fixtures on a wall to a casual viewer who visits the lounge to study, for example, its meaning and impact remain present and even demanding as they involuntarily engage with the installation by occupying the same open space.