becoming|un|becoming: deepening relations

The artworks by Leah Decter, a white settler artist and scholar, offer an opportunity to reflect on repair and care of relationships to the land and to each other. With captivating textures and colours, she provides a lens through which we may see differently familiar national icons and everyday experiences of Canadiana. 

becoming| un |becoming is an expression of shared and distinct approaches that deepen the possibilities of imagining decolonial/non-colonial futures, where un/learning and remembering, intercultural collaboration and intergenerational responsibility are realized.  

In her artworks, Leah enlists conceptual and material icons within the landscape of settler imagery in Canada that encourages critical reflection and careful consideration. She engages familiar national symbols, such as the canoe, Hudson Bay Company (HBC) blankets and depictions of so-called wilderness in landscape paintings to unsettle national narratives embedded in settler Canadian consciousness.  

Leah also interrogates national and provincial parks in recognition of the connection between uncritical nationalism and the violent enforcement of colonial property. The practice of dismantling and reconfiguring familiar materials to simultaneously reveal and disturb reflects Leah’s ongoing and diligent examination of her relationship as a white settler with the lands and waterways of the sovereign Indigenous territories, now known as Canada.  

Many of Leah’s works are based in traditions of making, such as rug hooking, weaving and visual storytelling in performance. Leah’s production processes are often laborious, requiring endurance and collaboration to realize. 

By tampering with cherished icons and uncritically celebrated anniversaries, such as Canada’s 150th since Confederation (2017), the artworks uncover that which is often hidden or unnoticed in public memory. Following an ethic of settler accountability and collaboration, Leah interrogates the structures of settler colonialism, without side-stepping the way she is implicated in them. 

The development of this exhibition is an ongoing collaboration between the artist and curators, which builds on our friendship and shared values. Working closely together, we practice an ethic of transformative decolonial artmaking/curating. We do so to undermine systemic racisms perpetuated by settler colonialism and to deepen our distinct and collective accountabilities.  

becoming| un |becoming is an invitation to collectively contemplate the ways in which we are all impacted by or implicated in the settler colonial project of Canadian nation-building. Further, the exhibition provokes us to ask: 

These artworks were undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program and with the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, Video Pool Media Arts Centre, and Curating Change: Centring Decolonization, Equity, and Social Justice in Exhibition Practice through Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

This exhibition was realized with the support of the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. We are grateful to Reach Art Gallery and Museum for their support of the first iteration of this exhibition in 2022.

The National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) are engaged in a unique partnership to support the self-determination and cultural sovereignty of Indigenous artists, cultural producers and communities. This exhibition is an extension of that partnership.

Curators: Rachelle Dickenson (National Gallery of Canada); Carla Taunton (NSCAD University)
Exhibition Coordination: Erin Bruce
Technical Team: Stephanie Germano, Dan Austin, Rob Keefe, Mark Garland, Neil Hossack, Fen Prior-Delahanty, Esma Gardner Jones, Sabrina Ferrari, and Evalyn Shields. 
Editors: Matt Harrison, Véronique Couillard
Graphic Design: Leah Ross, Mathieu Kirchmayer
French Translation: Caroline Couillard
Didactic Printing: Optima
Banner image photograph: Rachel Topham Photography