Skawennati Fragnito is a Montreal-based, Kahnawake Mohawk Territory-born, new media artist and independent curator. She completed her B.F.A. at Concordia University, and was previously the Curatorial Resident at The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery. Her work has received numerous awards, including imagineNATIVE’s Best New Media award in both 2010 and 2011, as well as 2011’s Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art.
In some lexicons, the word “heritage” is often relegated to past tense usage or, at most, is projected only as far as the present. This assumption about the inanimacy of heritage holds strong colonial connotations – history and heritage are very much living things, and of great relative importance, depending on one’s identity.
Until recently, spaces for discussing cultural legacy were limited, as media and formal discourse has (and continues to be) dominated by members of non-marginalized communities. The advent of the Internet, digital media and opportunity for self-representation, creates a new forum for these conversations. It is in these newly claimed spaces that we find Skawennati.
Skawennati’s work explores the themes of history, pop culture, technology and virtuality from such varied angles within digital territory that attempts to summarize it in a few paragraphs wouldn’t do it justice. Her career in new media began in 1996 with the pioneering of the CyberPowWow Project, an arts-oriented chat room and digital archive. Other notable works include Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, a web-based paper doll series (currently offline at the time of this writing), the on-going 80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music video project, and her most recent and ambitious project, the Second Life series TimeTraveller™
Visit Skawennati’s website here.
