Krista Belle Stewart
Seraphine, Seraphine, 2015
2-channel video
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, purchased with support from the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program and the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, 2018

Seraphine, Seraphine is a two-channel video installation juxtaposing footage from a 1967 CBC docu-drama following the experience of Krista Belle Stewart’s mother, Seraphine (Ned) Stewart, training to become a public health nurse, with footage from her mother’s Truth and Reconciliation testimony presented in 2013. The CBC documentary celebrates Seraphine Stewart, who became the first Indigenous public health nurse in BC in 1966. Her 2013 testimony was about her experiences at the Kamloops Indian Residential School from an eight-year-old girl to a teenager. While screened together, the audio track alternates from one to the other, moving by turns from past to present to future.

In reflecting on Seraphine’s schooling experiences recounted in this work, I think about systems of oppression and systems of care. The current escalating police riots in the United States and global Black Lives Matter demonstrations—against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic—have prompted Canada’s leaders to publicly acknowledge our country’s own systemic racism and colonial legacies of violence. Seraphine, Seraphine makes evident through personal account the ongoing, intergenerational trauma of these legacies. The artwork is an invitation to witness, again and again as echoed in its title and structure, the telling and re-telling of Seraphine’s story and the reassertion of her self-representation. The work serves as a reminder that our obligations to history and its enduring reverberations, and our obligations to one another are themselves intergenerational, if not unceasing processes of care.

Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, living and working in Vancouver and Brooklyn. Exhibitions include Fiction/Non-fiction at The Esker Foundation, Calgary and Music from the New Wilderness, Western Front, Vancouver. At Western Front, Stewart produced a collaborative multimedia performance working with wax cylinder recordings from 1918 by anthropologist James Alexander Teit of her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko. A string quartet responded live to Stewart’s loops of these traditional Okanagan songs presented alongside visual projections. Stewart holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and is an MFA graduate from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in upstate New York.

Works from the Collection considers one work in the Belkin’s permanent collection that particularly inspires us; at this moment in May 2020, we are looking at these works through the lens of the current crises around us. This round of Staff Picks is brought to you by Karen Zalamea, the Belkin’s Administrative Coordinator and Assistant to the Director. She is a visual artist and arts educator. To see more of the Belkin’s collection, visit https://collection.belkin.ubc.ca.