Greg Staats is Skarù:reˀ [Tuscarora] / Kanien’kehá:ka [Mohawk], Hodinöhsö:ni’. b. 1963, Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. A Toronto based artist whose Hodinöhsö:ni restorative aesthetic employs mnemonics of condolence and performative burdens articulated in visual forms that hold body and place including: oral transmission, text works, embodied wampum, photographic, sculpture, installation and video. Staats' practice conceptualizes Land as monument embodied within a continuum of relational placemaking with his on-reserve lived experience, trauma, and the explorations of ceremonial orality. Staats’ lens based language documents cycles of return towards a complete Onkwehón:we neha [our original ways] positionality, reciprocity and worldview.
Greg Staats, active since 1981 studied Applied Photography, Sheridan College, ON is the recipient of the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. Solo exhibitions include: articule, Montreal, Kelowna Art Gallery, Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, MN, Tom Thomson Gallery, McMaster Museum of Art, KWAG, Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, G44, Trinity Square Video/Images Festival. Galerie Séquence, QC. Group exhibitions include; AGYU, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Varley Art Gallery of Markham [OAAG award 2019], MOCNA, Sante Fe. Staats was Faculty for two Aboriginal VA Residencies, Banff Centre: Archive Restored (2009) and Towards Language (2010). Staats’ works are held in public, private and corporate collections. Upcoming solo exhibitions: Art Gallery of Ontario, CONTACT Photo Festival at Todmorden Mills. [2021] and Art Gallery of Hamilton, ON (2023). Staats has been shortlisted for the 2021 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University.
