Previous Exhibition

Home Slice | a Nico Williams Exhibition

October 30, 2024 - January 26, 2025

Curated by Shaelynn Recollet
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Home Slice interweaves snippets of hazy memory and striking realism to explore the world of the pawnshop, a repository for anecdotes and rumors where hundreds of disparate objects stand side by side, vacillating between reality and fiction. Home Slice is inspired by a personal story from the artist's childhood, in which a family member stole and pawned one of his video games. The game, now irretrievably lost, has been the subject of all kinds of speculation and assumptions. Nico Williams is greatly influenced by popular culture and the aesthetics of the 1990s; he seeks to highlight certain cultural convergences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practices through the representation of familiar objects from that period. Beadwork, an ancestral technique he reworks and updates and which combines tradition and modernity, becomes a vehicle for reflection and exchange between nations.

Nico Williams, ᐅᑌᒥᐣ (born in 1989) is a member if the Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Anishinaabe), currently living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. In 2021 he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University. He has presented his work on numerous occasions in Canada and abroad in solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2021), the PHI Foundation (2023) and the Armory Show in New York (2023). He has also received many awards and distinctions, including the prestigious Bronfman Fellowship for Contemporary Art (2021), and he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2022). His work is now part of major public and private collections in Quebec and Canada.