In May 2025, we were thrilled to welcome Dr. Camille Georgeson-Usher to the Vancouver Art Gallery as Audain Senior Curatorial Advisor on Indigenous Art.
This new role reflects the Gallery’s deep and ongoing commitment to Indigenous art, ensuring that vital expertise is embedded within our curatorial vision—shaping ambitious exhibitions, informing research and guiding strategic acquisitions for the permanent collection.
Camille’s appointment was made possible through the generous support of the Audain Foundation, whose longstanding relationship with the Vancouver Art Gallery has been instrumental in advancing the study and presentation of art in British Columbia.
In honour of National Indigenous Peoples Day, we asked Camille to tell us a bit about her role and select three works from the collection that speak to the themes she is currently exploring in her research.
Reflections by Dr. Camille Georgeson-Usher
It was important for me to start my work with the Gallery by becoming as familiar as possible with the works that are currently in the collection so that I can better advise on what acquisitions might be prioritized to create a fuller story within the collection itself. It has been satisfying to see how the collection has been added to over the years with specific curators, partners and donors bringing in important works. I enjoy seeing these clustered markers of time where individuals made a lasting impact on the Gallery by bringing in artworks that they were thinking and working in relation to. I hope I can do the same.
My family comes from Galiano Island. Our ancestors made this our home after a long history of removal, displacement and relocation from our original communities in both Coast Salish territory and Dene territory. Having grown up surrounded by the ocean, huddled between a grouping of gulf islands and the mainland, it may come as no surprise that my work has consistently referenced the ocean. I would often look across the Georgia Straight towards Vancouver thinking how close it was, how perhaps my own ancestors would have looked across the same body of water to where we came from originally. Having lived away from the West Coast for nearly fifteen years, my work always seemed to gravitate towards the ocean. I used writing as a way of remembering it, of being closer to it in a poetic sense, even while I found myself thousands of kilometers away.
My current research for the Gallery is focusing on the ways in which the Pacific Ocean has influenced how we create, how we find community and how we shift with the tides. “We” being those of us originally from these northwest pacific coastlines. In line with this, I am curious how poetry might help shape curatorial inquiry and, similarly, how the creative work of Indigenous artists from these coastal communities finds all the sensorial elements of the ocean. Within the collection itself, there are many works that speak to these ideas in different ways and to the richness of our individual, geographically based, relationships to the ocean.
Finally, through my academic work, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how we gather and how our gatherings are doing something. I have written extensively about how these gatherings, especially when around art, have the capacity to change the shape of space—spaces that often have deeply tethered colonial histories. The Vancouver Art Gallery is no exception, as the province’s old courthouse that was active during the time of the potlatch ban. I have often thought about how this building has ghosts. But ghosts, too, need to be tended to. So, we might ask ourselves: what does gathering look like here, now? How might our art and creativity do something within these walls? Can these gatherings of our bodies or of our artworks bring something back to this complicated building on these specific lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh?
The arts have always been how we have marked time visually, sonically, somatically and sensorially. The role of a curator is to understand how we are gathering artworks together to create a story that marks a specific moment in time, whether it is through the collection, exhibitions or our research. I believe that art has the capacity to hold our most difficult conversations. That it can weave itself into those tricky things where words fail us and provide alternative perspectives for us to view the world. I think we become better human beings when we have the capacity to view the world, opinions and ideas from another perspective, and art, for me, is the most powerful medium to enable that.
Working in this capacity at the Vancouver Art Gallery is a tremendous opportunity for me to work through some of these inquiries while providing perspectives and guidance as someone from here who has a deep appreciation for these waters from across generations.
As part of my ongoing research and relationship-building at the Gallery, I’ve selected three works from the collection that speak to the themes I’ve been exploring. I invite you to spend time with these works—as well as with works by other Indigenous artists—not just on Indigenous Peoples Day, but into the future. The Vancouver Art Gallery has an exceptional collection of works by Indigenous artists, and I can’t wait to introduce you to it.
Marianne Nicolson | Baxwana’tsi: The Container for Souls, 2006
I remember the first time I experienced Musga̱maḵw Dzawada̱’enux̱w artist Marianne Nicolson’s Baxwana’tsi: The Container for Souls (2006) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I can’t remember what year or which exhibition it was shown in, but I vividly remember the work and the affective quality it had on me still to this day. Crisp shapes created by the light spilling out of the glass box reverberated across the walls of the small room. That image remains imprinted in my memory.
In Kwakwaka’wakw culture, there is a connection between shadows and souls—one that Nicolson immerses viewers in through her use of light, reflection and the presence of people moving through the space. Visitors become part of the work as it cast shapes that move from the walls to their own bodies, their shadows intercepting and reshaping the light. It wasn’t until I was researching this work again that I remembered how this contemporary take on a bentwood box tells the story of Raven who stole the light, but it also speaks to the loss of a loved one—literally shining images of them from within the container for souls.
Understanding the box as a vessel for souls, there is a palpable sense of loss, mourning and love that is felt in the images of the two girls projected on the wall. In the images of family members framed by traditional formline designs, we might see how this ornately designed box is an honouring of these souls. The interplay of light and shadow becomes both visual and visceral, allowing visitors to experience the loss and reverence the work holds. As their own bodies distort the imagery, their shadows become reminders of the souls held within.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas | Looking Out #11, 2006
Like so many of us, I came to know Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ work through his uniquely delicate yet crisp visual stories—works that gave rise to what is now known as Haida manga. Through this style, we see the influence of Japanese comic book graphics merge with Yahgulanaas’ play on formline design and Haida stories. His work often carries a sense of lightness and playfulness.
As I conduct my research on the ocean in relation to the Gallery’s permanent collection, I was drawn to this work in particular because it incorporates masks and other figures that look out toward a coastline, while a darkened figure in the bottom right corner is focused on a task. There is a softness to this piece, made possible through the use of watercolour, that gently gestures toward the shapes in relation to the water. While much of Yahgulanaas’ work employs strong outlines, this one is more subtle.
There is a juxtaposition between the loose depictions of trees and water and the figures that gradually gain contrast as our eyes move to the right of the composition. Narrative plays an active role in this work. Figures that may at first appear familiar begin to shift under closer observation: a hand holding a measuring tape; a mask-like figure connecting with a house; a man carving or skinning an animal, with city buildings on his feet.
In the movement from the loose, gentle depictions on the left to the darker, more contained style on the right, I found myself wondering if the work might be speaking to the ways in which we have shifted away from our connections to land and water to being consumed by the throngs of capitalism.
Through this work, I considered how the ocean might teach us to blur boundaries—to allow for a subtle and gentle way of existing that continues to move and shift.
Maureen Gruben | We all have to go someday. Do the best you can. Love one another., 2019
In every instance where I’ve spent time with Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben’s work, I find myself getting lost in the depth of detail, the poetic ways in which her work might be read, and its subtle, quiet quality. It may seem unusual to describe visual works that don’t include sound as “quiet,” but, after looking at Gruben’s work, I feel as though I’ve heard the whistling redirection of wind across the Arctic tundra, the hushed conversations between family members working with animal hide, or the crunch of footsteps on fields of packed snow. Her work evokes this poetic, sensorial response in me.
In this piece, We all have to go someday. Do the best you can. Love one another. (2019), Gruben has sewn threads to tell the story of family by mapping the blood vessels of her father’s heart. The hide, stretched across an aluminum frame and stitched with colourful thread, becomes a story of generations—connected across past, present and future—through this mapping of a person who ties them together.
The mapping shifts in material. Some parts are rendered in colourful dotted lines that jut outward, while the right-hand side is more muted—like an imprint, footprints left in snow. Perhaps resembling caribou tracks or river systems winding across the land, these mirrored, meandering lines serve as reminders of histories and futures that wiggle and weave across our various territories.
About the Curator
Dr. Camille Georgeson-Usher is a respected scholar, curator and writer of Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene heritage. She is currently Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Indigenous Art in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. In her new role as Audain Senior Curatorial Advisor on Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Dr. Georgeson-Usher brings a powerful combination of academic insight, curatorial expertise and community leadership to the Gallery. She holds an MA in Art History from Concordia University and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University. Her research explores collective movement through space, everyday intimacies and how public art fosters gathering and connection. As former Executive Director of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective and current CoChair of the Toronto Biennial of Art, she brings deep experience in Indigenous artistic and curatorial practice, community engagement and governance.
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