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, articulated in visual forms that hold body and place including: oral transmission, text works, embodied wampum (quahog and whelk shells — the medium of truth with the intention of recording the heart and good mind of the Hodinöhsö:ni’), photographic series, sculpture, installation and video. Staats exists in the liminal space of transition inherent with the body, land and memory. Staats's practice conceptualizes Land as monument embodied within a continuum of gathering images 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.
Active since 1981, Staats studied applied photography at Sheridan College. He exhibits extensively nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Gallery of Hamilton; articule, Montreal; Kelowna Art Gallery; Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg; Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound; McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Mercer Union, Toronto; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Gallery 44, Toronto; and Galerie Séquence, Quebec City, with group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of York University; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Markham; and Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe. His works are held in public, private and corporate collections. Staats served as faculty for two Aboriginal Visual Arts Residencies at the Banff Centre (2009 and 2010). Artist-in-residencies include the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014–15), Open Studio, the Banff Centre, Art Gallery of York University, Trinity Square/Images and Longhouse Labs–University of Waterloo. Awards include the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography from the Canada Council of the Arts (1999), the Toronto Arts Foundation’s inaugural Indigenous Artist Award (2021) and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2024).
