October 17, 2024 at 5:30 PM

Edmonds Park, Intersection of Humphries and Rosewood Ave, Burnaby

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5:30 PM: Doors open, Book sale

6:00 PM: Poetry and artist talk followed by refreshments

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Join us to celebrate Michelle Sound’s visit to FLEET and the launch of Kindred Tracings, an exhibition catalogue published by the Burnaby Art Gallery featuring the work of Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich, Minahil Bukhari, Russna Kaur and Michelle Sound. To mark this special event, guest-reader and award-winning writer Dallas Hunt will be reading a selection of poems. Local independent bookstore Widlfire Books will be onsite selling a selection of enticing titles, and Michelle Sound and Minahil Bukhari will share an artist talk exploring their practices and how motherhood and matrilineal learning and creating informs their work and process.

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative worked published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children's book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and was a finalist for CBC Kids Reads. His first poetry collection, CREELAND, was published in 2022, and his new collection Teeth, was released by Nightwood Editions in April 2024. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous Literatures at the University of British Columbia.

Minahil Bukhari is a Pakistani-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, working in video, sound, painting, sculpture, digital media and installation art. In her practice, Bukhari explores the concepts of loss, trauma, displacement and systematic infractions through the lens of political minimalism, creating a subconscious reality of impermanence and ephemerality. Having experienced displacement and its implications of loss, Bukhari believes that comprehension and understanding of these encounters exist beyond the scope of language. Her focus is on sensation and sensibility, erasure and absence. Bukhari’s work is a tangible stimulus of the intangible effects, memories, repercussions and histories that reside within us. Her artworks are poetic gestures that enable a sense-feeling that transcends the boundaries of language.

Bukhari completed a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Alberta University of the Arts and a master’s degree in fine arts from Simon Fraser University. She has received multiple awards, fellowships and residencies, including the Steven Shane Annual Graduate Entrance Scholarship, a Special Graduate Entrance Scholarship Graduate Fellowship, and a Travel and Minor Research Award from Simon Fraser University and a Burrard Arts Foundation residency. Her works have been exhibited in Canada, digitally and internationally.

Michelle Sound is a Cree and Métis artist and mother. Sound’s work explores personal and familial narratives with a consideration of Indigenous artistic processes. Her works explore cultural identities and histories by engaging materials and concepts within a contemporary context. Through painting, beadwork, photography, drum making and caribou hair tufting, she highlights that acts of care and joy are situated in family and community. She works with traditional and contemporary materials and techniques to explore maternal labour, identity and cultural knowledges.

Sound is a member of Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation in Treaty 8 Territory, Northern Alberta. She was born and raised on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her mother is Cree from Kinuso, Alberta, Treaty 8 territory, and her father’s family is Métis from the Buffalo Lake Métis settlement in central Alberta, Treaty 6 territory. She holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Simon Fraser University and a master’s degree in applied arts from Emily Carr University Art + Design. Her artwork often explores her Cree and Métis identity and her experience rooted in family, place and history.

Sound engages in public art through various projects, including street banners in New Westminster, a printed transit shelter mural in Edmonton and a painted mural at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre in Edmonton. Recent solo exhibitions include Neutral Ground in Regina, Daphne Art Centre in Montréal, Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, Gallery 101 in Ottawa, and Burrard Arts Foundation and Seymour Art Gallery in Vancouver.

Wildfires Bookshop resists the singular visions and binaries that the status quo enforces, and creates fertile ground for us to learn and collectivize. Wildfires empowers us to be part of constructing a world filled with care and possibility.

Wildfires curates books that celebrate both historically and presently excluded voices and stories. Owner Samita is a second generation Panjabi queer woman. Her work is not only informed by these identities, but also from being a settler on stolen and occupied Indigenous land.

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Image (above): Michelle Sound, Sipikiskisiw (Remembers Far Back) (detail), 2022. Archival photo and map on paper, embroidery thread, rick rack, vintage beads, bugle beads, glass seed beads, caribou tufting and porcupine quills. 182.88 cm x 91.44 cm. Photography: Jake Kimble