EXHIBITIONS / GPS (THE GOOD RED ROAD)

18.06.2009 to 11.07.2009

Rolande Souliere is a visual artist whose colourful sculptures and installations often combine abstraction with organic forms, the handcrafted and the readymade. Her art oscillates between painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, craft and concept. Souliere's
work focuses on the cross-cultural relationships between the indigenous and the non-indigenous in contemporary arts. Recently she has combined indigenous motifs and abstract forms with road signs.
With GPS (The Good Red Road) Souliere utilises the acronym for "Global Positioning System" with a common phrase used by many different Native American communities: "The Good Red Road," which is a North American indigenous term that translates as: "one who is walking the road of a balanced life." The combination of the indigenous with the non-indigenous is an indication that the artist is utilising her own system of knowledge; a system, like the GPS, that stores, analyses and displays referenced information, which pertains to the artist's visual, social, political and cultural codes.
This exhibition also commemorates a road trip from Vancouver to Seattle made by Souliere with her mother and sister in 2008. Souliere noticed several road signs acknowledging upcoming First Nation reservations along the highway. Shortly thereafter, whenever they approached such a sign, the three of them would call out "AANIIN," ("hello" in Ojibway language) and the First Nation they just passed. Therefore the road signs in the exhibition can be seen as an intriguing exchange of language that draws on the visual, the written and the spoken in a cross-cultural context.
Souliere was born in Toronto, Ontario and is a member of Michipicoten First Nation. She relocated to Australia in 1999 and currently lives and works in Sydney. She completed her Masters of Visual Arts (2006) from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and has been a finalist in both the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship (2006; 2007) and Fauvettte Loureiro Memorial Artist Travelling Scholarship (2008). Last year Souliere had her first international solo exhibition at Grunt Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, and was included in the international exhibition Points of Origin at Artspace, Sydney. In 2010 Souliere will have a solo exhibition at The New Gallery,
Calgary, Alberta.

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