Presented in collaboration with Queer Arts Festival and SUM Gallery, join Natis and Dion Smith-Dokkie, to learn more about what they have been up to throughout their time at Griffin Art Projects!

Natis is a conceptual painter who lives and works in Berlin. His art materialises itself through multiple parallel and distinct research-based practices. He creates, embodies, and instrumentalizes different performative artist personae for each of these practices that challenge the social understanding and the role of the artist as a (post-)modern subject. These alter-egos deal with various fields like; personal or communal memory and forgetting, speculative storytelling (non-)linear temporality, gender, post-colonialism, and new materialism. Besides his art practice, he works towards completing his doctorate at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) Hamburg on art-historical and contemporary use of visual artist alter egos, researching why these mental and physical alternations or mutations take place in artists’ lives.

My name is Dion Smith-Dokkie and I am a painter and visual artist currently residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ homelands. I am a recent graduate of the UBC MFA in Visual Arts program and hold degrees from UVIC (BA) and Concordia (BFA). Mediation and translation are key operations in my practice. Through these, I undertake experiments with interface phenomena, mutation, envelopes, and media skins in the fields of painting, drawing, and video. I grew up in the Peace River region of British Columbia and Alberta. I am a gay/queer mixed-race European-Indigenous man and am a member of West Moberly First Nations, a Treaty 8 First Nation located in northeastern British Columbia.