In 2018, Emily Neufeld traveled with her partner and 10-year-old son through the Prairies, the previous home of her Mennonite grandmother, to investigate abandoned farmhouses, built by settler migrants in the 19th century. Through subtle interventions, captured in beautiful photographs, Neufeld grapples with tensions of colonial history, and contends with her own responsibilities as an artist and environmental advocate of settler descent. In conjunction with her recent exhibitions at the Richmond art Gallery and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, we are proud to release the publication Prairie Invasions. Prairie Invasions features documentation of Neufeld's installations, notes and photographs from her field work, and an essay from Nura Ali.
Emily Neufeld was born in Alberta, on Treaty 6 and 7 lands, and now lives and works on the unceded territory of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam in North Vancouver. Her practice investigates place, and how humans change and are changed by the surrounding environment, and the layers of memory and psychic history that accumulate in a material world. In addition to collaborative projects with other artists, recent solo exhibitions include Before Demolition (2017: Burrard Arts Foundation), and Picture Window (2016: Vancouver Heritage Foundation), a large-scale billboard on the CBC Wall in downtown Vancouver. Neufeld has created and participates in community sharing gardens, and sees land as fundamental to her research process. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013.
Nura Ali is a visual artist, writer and curator, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. She received a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a BA in English Literature, Art History and Italian from the University of Leicester and a BA in History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her wide-ranging practise investigates the linguistic scaffolding upholding the assumptions we bring to the act of reading and writing. Alongside her visual arts practise Nura is also a prolific writer, a lifelong learner and has participated in various national and international residencies. Her work has been shown nationally and received numerous awards and grants; most recently from the Calgary Arts Development, the Rozsa Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. When she is not curled up with a book or puttering around her garden, Nura is dreaming up ways to dismantle oppressive structures and for this reason became one of the founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union; a unionised workers cooperative whose mission it is to transform labour practises in the arts sector and create fair, equitable and sustainable working conditions for artists and cultural workers.