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

October, 2009
The single-channel video of "Horse" has won Best Experimental Short Film at imagineNATIVE! Woot!

October, 2009
Where Have You Been In These Shoes? I will be performing at the Bata Shoe Museum, 327 Bloor Street West, Toronto during Nuit Blanche, between 1am and 4am. Come on down!

September, 2009
Come and see the Toronto Mash-up! Diaspora Dialogues has asked me to perform at their contribution to Word on the Street. I will also be on a panel discussion that day, Art, Revisited: Exploring Re-interpretation at 4:30, same place.

March, 2009
I've been commissioned to write a poem for the City of Toronto's 175th anniversary.

February, 2009
Photo essay of "Shoot the Indian" in the Canadian Theatre Review "Performance Art" issue. Shawna Dempsey is on the cover.

December, 2008
Made the cover of FUSE Magazine! Inside is an interview of myself and Cheryl L'Hirondelle by the one and only Wanda Nanibush.

Performance artist, New Media artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and educator Archer Pechawis was born in Alert Bay, on Vancouver Island in 1963. He has been a practicing artist since 1984 with particular interest in the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology, often merging "traditional" objects such as hand drums with "forward engineered" devices such as Mac PowerBooks. His work has been exhibited across Canada and featured in publications such as Fuse Magazine and Canadian Theatre Review. Archer has been the recipient of many Canada Council and BC Arts awards, and was the recipient of the Best New Media award at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in 2007.

Archer also works extensively with Native youth as part of his art practice, teaching performance and digital media for the Indigenous Media Arts Group and in the public school system. Of Cree and European ancestry, he is a member of Mistawasis First Nation, Saskatchewan, and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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?