Archer Pechawis | Performance & Media Artist

Archer Pechawis during Calgary's 2007 International Festival of Animated Objects

Yup, that's me, hanging out in my Calgary hotel room during the International Festival of Animated Objects. You'll find all manner of ephemera floating around here: images, video, words...

Please feel free to send me any feedback with the handy-dandy contact form below.

Best,

Archer

June 10th, 2008
"Shoot the Indian" went great! Got some awesome bruises, check the footage!

May 13th, 2008
I'm doing a performance at HIVE ~~June 6th~~ (whoops!, I swapped dates with Paul Wong, i'm on June 8th now, see below) a new piece called "Shoot the Indian". Please come check it out. Some of Vancouver's best performance artists will be doing durational works "in the lobby".

Here is the list:
June 5 - Paul Wong
June 6 - Skeena Reece
June 7 - Bobbi Kozinuk
June 8 - Archer Pechawis
June 10 - Marlene Madison
June 11 - Margaret Dragu
June 12 - Cheryl L'Hirondelle
June 13 - Norma
June 14 - Rebecca Belmore

There will also be killer music and the cream of the Vancouver theatre scene showing new work. For more information see the HIVE website.

October 2007
"An Indian Act: Shooting the Indian Act" has won the 2007 ImagineNATIVE Festival "Best New Media" award. Woot!

My current fascination is what I call 'transitional Cree culture', the place where Cree culture meets the onrush of millennial technology. I explore this fascination in performance and computer-based artworks. Using digital technologies I attempt to locate and query this meeting place, however fleeting. My work is a temporary roadmap. These maps are signposts of the moment, which I create to share.

I wrote that in 1999, and I still like it.

Archer Pechawis is a media-integrated performing artist, New Media artist, writer, curator and teacher. He has been creating solo performance works since 1984. His practice investigates the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology. Archer also works as a "First Nations Stand-Up Essayist", webmonkey and MC.

So what is a "media-integrated performing artist"? Good question! In short, it means I use audio, video and computer technologies in my performance work, which itself spans a wide range of topics, although they usually relate to Native issues.

Sometimes I just do performances for fun. Not often though.

From an interview with Deanna Bowen, FRONT magazine, March/April 1997, discussing my performance "Memory"

"I am not a performance artist in the classic, art-school-graduate sense. I never went to art school, I don't have an art history/art theory understanding of things. Although we are theorizing about it, my relationship to the work isn't coming from a theoretical place. It's asking questions I really want some answers to. I want to de-colonize my soul. ... I've had native people tell me that the following things are 'traditional': heterosexism, patriarchy, the 'horns and pitchfork' devil, dark is evil/light is good, you name it. I know I have an idealized notion of pre-contact Indianness, but give me a break!"

"If we (Indians) are going to untangle ourselves from the mess we are in then some hard-assed questions have got to be asked. I am addressing these questions to the Aboriginal community for an internal debate. I'm not interested in non-Native peoples' thoughts on this matter. It's an Indian thing. And hopefully that will give us some room to breathe on this, cuz it doesn't have to be hashed out in a public sphere. It could be said that I'm contradicting myself because I am not presenting this work in a 'Native only' space, but I'm not looking for immediate responses. I think the issue of what is 'traditional' is going to be a long, long debate."

Wanna holla atcha boy?