Kandis Friesen

My art practice focuses on public memory and cultural identity, looking at how these two things overlap and interact. Part of this work looks at how archival collections – official, community-based, oral stories or songs, and family albums – can be used to reconstruct and represent histories that get left out, or pushed aside, in official accounts. I’m interested in how images and sounds can be remixed – pulled apart and pushed together – to create new ways of seeing, hearing, thinking, and making. Working across different media – video, drawing, sound, animation, print, and textiles – I work with these ideas to create space for possible pasts and possible futures in the present, with a sense of recovery, restoration, and justice at the fore. In parallel with my art practice, I also teach academic and community-based arts workshops, dedicated to creating open and accessible spaces for self-determined learning, experimentation, and cultural expression.