Trading Post Humanism gathers a body of work that moves through joy, culture, pain, anxiety, and connection, and places each piece beside the question of what it costs.
Every work in the show carries a beaded price tag, hand-stitched on deer hide, hanging from the piece as part of it. The tag is not separate from the artwork. It is the artwork acknowledging the room it has entered: a market that has long set terms for Indigenous makers, sorted ceremony from craft, and assigned value through frames built elsewhere. The trading post is the historical shorthand for that arrangement. The beadwork is the older, slower economy it tried to replace.
The title also points toward posthumanism, the contemporary turn that decentres the human and recognizes agency, kinship, and personhood in animals, plants, land, technology, and spirit. Indigenous worldviews have held this understanding for far longer than the term has existed. Anishinaabe thought does not place the human at the top of a hierarchy. It situates us inside a web of relations with other beings, human and non-human, seen and unseen. The work in this show draws from that framework. The serpents, the lodges, the lightboxes, the figures studded with stone and shell are not metaphors for human experience. They are relatives, presences, and forces with their own standing.
The paintings, prints, and lightboxes range across interior and shared experience. Some sit with grief and mental health. Some hold humour, ceremony, and the steady work of relation. Read together, they refuse the split between the personal and the political, and ask the viewer to hold both at once: the figure on the wall, and the number on the tag.