Gallery Gachet hosts an exhibit from Vancouver-based artist Dion Smith-Dokkie that investigates maps and their meaning, from Nov. 24 to Jan 20. In This Will Be the First of a Thousand Worlds We Give Life To, Smith-Dokkie modulates various maps, including locations of northeastern British Columbia, transforming them artistically through overlays and modulation.

The resulting work looks to provoke ideas and pose questions about maps and their meaning, including how mapping can add meaning, or take meaning away, for a mapped region’s residents, including Indigenous people.

“How does that system of knowledge function within an Indigenous worldview, and in what ways is it generative? And in what ways does applying those terms… make the Indigenous versions thereof meaningless, or remove their context. That’s a problem I’m interested in,” says Smith-Dokkie.

Closing the distance

Locating themself as a European-Indigenous gay man and member of the West Moberly First Nation, Smith-Dokkie has long had a focus on “place” and “space”.

For example, the current exhibit on display at Gallery Gachet stems partly from some traditional land-use mapping work he helped complete for his own First Nation back in 2014. That mapping project involved taking stock of traditional land uses in and around the First Nation’s land, and mapping that alongside newly proposed construction and development areas.

A few years later, while carrying out their BFA a ways away from home at Concordia University in Montreal, Smith-Dokkie once again found themself thinking about mapping and space. As someone who spent most of their life growing up in and around the Peace River region, Smith-Dokkie saw maps as a way to close the distance.

“I guess I was just feeling very distant from my entire family,” says Smith-Dokkie. “When I felt sad or lonely I found satellite images very pretty. I found it was an interesting way to look at where I’d been or to go to different places… it felt like an interesting way to deal with distance.”

A focus on water

Water is one of the more substantial recurring themes in the exhibit, featuring prominently in the maps themselves, and in the fluidity of the acrylic resin that suffuses some of the works. Smith-Dokkie says part of the focus on water came to mind because of how integral and contentious water has been in his region.

“West Moberly First Nations was really involved in challenging the construction of Site C for quite some time. And so that was in the community ethos, something we all knew about, talked about, like with my family anyways,” says Smith-Dokkie. “There’s also very contentious fracking happening in the region as well. So water seemed like a very important flashpoint that I wanted to, in my own way, as a very emerging artist at that time, sort of delve into this current exhibition.”

When it comes to talking about water, Smith-Dokkie feels that it’s valuable to display this exhibit, which so heavily features the Peace River region, in Vancouver, the town where he currently resides.

Smith-Dokkie notes how in an era of resource extraction, water can sometimes be oversimplified, talked about as an energy source without consequence, despite the real impacts its implementation can have without due regard for its impact on the land.

“So much like arable farmland was lost with the construction of Site C. The W.A.C. Bennett dam was an ecological disaster that’s still ongoing in many ways,” says Smith-Dokkie. “It’s easy to ignore it unless it’s there.”

Overall, Smith-Dokkie hopes to open that conversation up some more, giving audiences here a chance to reflect more on the complexities of northern B.C. residents’ relationship to land.

“The way some people down south here talk about people up north who are working in these extractive industries I thought it was unfair and un-nuanced. There’s little other choice other than to like work in these industries,” says Smith-Dokkie. “I was like, how do we strike a balance in a dialogue here… The economic development that makes life livable down in southern BC, how is that demonised and required all the same?”

For more information on the exhibit, visit www.gachet.org