Value: $450
Artist Bio:
Karalyn Reuben is an urban mixed Oji-Cree German-British artist, from London Ontario. Through her interdisciplinary work she explores different possibilities of explanations of life and different ways of being human. She is drawn to the responsibility to share how she thinks and feels in hope in connecting with others in her search of herself. It is a mutual and grounding understanding she seeks. Reuben is recovering her Oji-Cree identity through learning process and knowledge, embedded in Indigenous art and material culture and history. In furthering her knowledge based in her current research, and in receiving teachings from her father she has come to understand concepts of Anishinaabe traditional knowledge. She has an Interdisciplinary BFA where she specialized in printmaking, from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax Nova Scotia. She recently finished her second BFA, in Indigenous Visual Culture at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto Ontario.
Artist Statement:
Sacredness from Within, is series of small watercolour paintings that originated from previous work that explored my fascination of landscape and the big life questions; why are we here, what is my purpose, where are the answers. I created images of landscapes looking to the land, sky and water for answers. In this work I was utilizing religious iconography but have since transitioned to Indigenous iconography, derived from petroglyphs and pictographs. This in combination with an education in Indigenous oral histories, myths, legends and creation stories, I’ve embedded a combination of everything I have learned into simplified symbols in the backgrounds of imagined landscapes in these works. Each piece is a vessel that holds my understandings of Anishinaabe knowledge and my wonderment of the world we exist within. My father has instilled in me that land is sacred, and that is what drives this work, to show the sacred power of land, sky and water.