David Campion and Sandra Shields

David Campion and Sandra Shields create photo-text installations that appropriate popular literary forms as a means of disruption. Much of their work is grounded in the space and history found outside their door. The couple initially worked in literature and have three books (including a BC Book Prize winner) but for the past ten years have focused on installations for public gallery spaces. The site-specific Memory in the Valley, recently collected by Surrey Art Gallery, mimics tourist points of interest as a means to investigate conflicting histories. The collaboration with Stó:lō Nation on Man Turned to Stone: T’xwelátse was an important precursor to their current project, Grand Theft Terra Firma. Their recent mar poles of c̓əsnaʔəm, commissioned by Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Centre and the Museum of Anthropology, evokes the past and present city within the borrowed form of a picture book for tourists. Shields comes to the subject of colonization as the great-granddaughter of early Alberta settlers, while Campion approaches from the vantage of a recent British immigrant who grew up in southern Africa during the era that saw colonial governments fall.