Frequent Stopping IV
Frequent Stopping IV
By Rolande Souliere
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere. This project brings together two large-scale, public works: Frequent Stopping IV presented at Yaletown-Roundhouse Canada Line Station and Frequent Stopping V across CAG’s street level façade. Souliere’s multi-media practice entangles the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with that of contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. Both installations draw from the artist’s ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive installations.
Souliere has a long history of working with materials and metaphors of the road. She strips these seemingly universal symbols from their usual contexts and separates them from their role as wayfinding aids to suggest the extent to which regulatory bodies dictates our movements on the land. The Frequent Stopping series—also seen wrapping the exterior of a number of B-line buses throughout Vancouver as part of a larger CAG project with TransLink throughout 2019—points to the ways in which our perception of boundaries shifts according to perspective and to the fact that so many Indigenous land claims—despite being first pressed decades or even centuries ago—have yet to be resolved. Souliere’s ultra-visible, highly public interventions mark space in a gesture that speaks of permanent visibility and reclamation, delineating lines that cannot be drawn or redrawn.
