Nahanni McKay, Loop 14 #2, 2018, 35mm film photograph, Courtesy of the artist
Habituate, Acclimate
September 2021 – August 2024
Habituate, Acclimate features the works of two emerging Alberta photographers, Nahanni McKay and Liam Kavanagh-Bradette. Both artists have created a series that explore emerging survival dependencies necessitated by the effects that humans have had upon the environment.
In the summer of 2016, McKay was working as a campground attendant in Banff National Park when a wolf was euthanized after becoming habituated to human food. The incident had a lasting impression on the artist and she began to question the location of the campground within an active wildlife corridor. The title of her series, Loop 14, is a reference to the location where the wolf was shot. The subject matter may be heavy, but Mckay’s photographs are serene and thoughtful – laying to rest the spirit of this wolf – as well as paying respects to the five additional wolves that died of unnatural causes in Banff that summer.
Kavanagh-Bradette’s work is also related to a food supply dependency but in relation to the people of Nunavut who rely on freight shipments from southern Canada to deliver essential cargo (food, goods and fuel). Since the beginning of the twentieth century, climate change has opened up the seaways and drastically changed Inuit economy and culture. Kavanagh-Bradette brings attention to this new reality through his photographs of the people working at the forefront of the change.
In terms of educational content, this exhibition speaks not only to art curriculums, but also to scientific educational themes within the Alberta curriculum including but not limited to habitats, “waste and our world”, as well as climate change and learning about healthy ecosystems.
Curated by Shannon Bingeman. Developed with EXPOSURE Photography Festival.
Touring from the Alberta Society of Artists, TREX Southwest
Artist Bio
Liam Kavanagh-Bradette is a documentary photographer living in Edmonton, Alberta. By examining the intersection between Canada’s economic and environmental impacts on the land and its people, Kavanagh-Bradette’s work highlights many of the real-world implications of the theories and concepts he studied at York University in the international studies program. Liam then studied photojournalism at Loyalist College and worked briefly for local papers, such as The Wellington Times and the Lac La Biche Post, before deciding to focus on both freelance and long-term, self-directed projects to bring attention to issues ignored or overlooked.
Nahanni McKay is a Métis artist from Banff, Alberta. She graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2017 and was a photography practicum participant at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2019. McKay resides in Banff and plans to continue her studies at the Burren College of Art in Ireland in the fall of 2020. McKay’s practice is about her connection to the land of the Canadian Rockies where she grew up. She communicates this unique connection through film-based photography. Her creative practice contemplates the human impact on the environment, focusing on national parks in Canada. She observes that humans are so consumed in the digital world that we forget to live in the natural one. Growing up in Banff National Park has made her focus on the mix between tourism and wildlife.