September 21 – December 1, 2019

In 1978, the feminist Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada staged a three-year protest against Muckamuck Restaurant. The dispute allied Indigenous women workers with other labour activists, igniting a new era of accountability. Lifting a message from the strike’s picket signs, ReMatriate’s banner YOURS FOR INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY acknowledges these women’s efforts and asks what sovereignty means thirty years later.

Made possible with generous support from the RBC Emerging Canadian Artist Program. 

Bio

ReMatriate Collective (based in unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ / Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Canada) is an Indigenous art collective composed of women across Western and Northern Canada. The Collective believes it is important to enable Indigenous women to control the visual representation of their identities through active participation in the online space. As ReMatriate, members Kelly Edzerza-Bapty, Denver Lynxleg and Jeneen Frei-Njootli prepare image submissions for use on social media to connect and empower Indigenous peoples, particularly women, through art interventions.

Exhibition Site

259 Lake Shore Blvd East

The life of this nondescript building reveals the area’s economic history. Its first tenant in 1945, the Standard Chemical Company, produced methanol, formaldehyde, and charcoal. A railway line to the south tethered the site to the movement of goods. By 1954, the building was divided into a warehouse and a showroom, a configuration that remained intact over the course of various leaseholders, including oil and electrical supply companies and a series of car dealerships. (The advertising of its most recent tenant, Volvo, is still visible on the façade.) This building’s fate is indeterminate, as real estate development is increasingly filling the voids left by industrial decline.

259 Lake Shore Blvd East
Toronto ON
M5A 3T7