Honour Their Names
Honour Their Names
Running March 15, 2023 to March 24, 2023.
Opening Reception March 15 at 11AM.
Full Program Schedule
Wednesday / March 15, 11 AM
Opening - Feast - Speakers (livestreamed to Pivot Legal’s facebook. Livesteam of event linked HERE).
Thursday / March 16, 2-4 PM
Panel: Systemic Responses to Police Murder (livestreamed to Pivot Legal’s facebook page).
Friday / March 17, 2-4 PM
Defund 604 Network presents an overview of the IIO (Independent Investigations Office).
Friday / March 17, 6-8 PM
Living Freedom: Immersive Soundscape Featuring Ruby Smith Díaz @tierranegra_arts.
Saturday / March 18, 2-4 PM
These Zines are Cop Free! Youth art workshop presented by Tonye Aganaba and @imlilyaganaba.
Friday / March 24, 6-8 PM
Closing night & community jam.
Presented by #JusticeForJared with support from the BC Civil Liberties Association, @cpddw_vancouver, Defund 604 Network, @gallerygachet, @justiceforanthonyaust, Justice for Julian Jones @teechmacreations, @221aweee, @masks4eastvan, @pivotlegal, @regis4everfoundation, @tierranegra_arts, Tracking (In)justice, @vinesfestival & @vivomediaarts. Digital art piece by @imlilyaganaba.
Image ID: Text: Justice for Jared Presents Honour Their Names & International Day Against Police Brutality. Show opens Wed. March 15 at 11 AM. Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings. Exhibit Hours: Tues-Sat 12-16 PM. Show closes Friday March 24. Opening & Closing Feast. Workshops. Speakers. Soundscape. This event is organized on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Exhibit & Organizing work supported by: BC Civil Liberties Association, Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War, Defund 604 Network, Gallery Gachet, Justice for Anthony Aust, Justice for Julian Jones, 221A, Masks 4 East Van, Pivot Legal Society, Regis Forever Foundation, Tierra Negra Arts, Tracking Injustice, VINES Art Festival, VIVO Media Arts Centre.” Bottom of the image features logos for each organization. Background image: Justice for Jared Logo superimposed on an eye looking upwards. Image is composed of bold, bright red images, with black and white text.
Click here for the Facebook Event.
Click here for Pivot Legal’s Facebook for livestreams of Honour Their Names events.
Didactic Text
On December 1, 2022, the Independent Investigations Office (IIO) of BC determined that there were reasonable grounds to believe that at least three of the RCMP officers complicit in the death of Jared Lowndes (Wet’suwet’en, Laksilyu Clan) may have committed several offences in relation to various uses of force. The IIO charge recommendations came a year and a half after Jared Lowndes's death. At this moment, during the second annual exhibition of Honour their Names at Gallery Gachet, the RCMP officers responsible for the death of Jared Lowndes still work for the RCMP, live their lives and walk freely, while justice for Jared Lowndes remains subject to contest. In contrast, a mother has lost her child, a child has lost their father, and a community has lost one of their peoples.
Although the IIO has provided their recommendations in the Jared Lowndes case, the battle for justice continues, as detailed in the demands:
No more police murders
The police must be disarmed
Bodycams should always be turned on
End the use and abuse of police dogs
A transformation of the IIO to include more Indigenous oversight and exclude ex-cops
No more recruitment and paid training for RCMP or police forces.
Several Indigenous teachings pose the land as something borrowed that deserves to be stewarded for future generations; in contrast, systems of white supremacy pose the land as something to be controlled. The methods of control utilized by whiteness against the land include the never-ending iterations of settler colonization, economic warfare and disenfranchisement and police brutality against Black and Brown bodies. For the Indigenous peoples of these lands, police brutality acts as a method of control that attempts to criminalize Indignity and Indigenous bodies on their land and instill fear among Indigenous community members, an attempt to subvert resistance and opposition to systems of power rooted in whiteness and white supremacy.
In Honour Their Names, exhibiting artists Laura Holland (Wet’suwet’en) and Laura Linklater (Métis) centre the importance of remembering, resilience and resistance. Each canvas, appliquèd with the names of Indigenous and Black bodies who have lost their lives at the hands of the Canadian police force, acts as a monument to the individual lives, history and communities that each of the names represents and the urgent need to destabilize institutions that ensure catastrophe on Black and Brown bodies and communities, since time immemorial.
The community-centred and collaborative process of the artwork, and using the gallery as a community organizing space, creates a bridge towards general mobilization against systems of power that oppress and unleash the viewer's imagination towards the everyday warrior, reinforcing resistance as occurring in different registers of fugitivity. In text and textiles, on boldly patterned cloth, the social fabric of community holds the line.
Holland and Linklater‘s textile works delicately balance love and rage, stitch by stitch, acting as a form of Indigenous creativity that does not allow itself to be commodified and fetishized by the white gaze; this is work created from a place of grief, resistance and remembrance. Holland and Linklater confront the viewers with the reality of the current state of Indigeneity in so-called “Canada” and the expectation from white audiences to be able to encounter artwork created by Indigenous peoples without acknowledging the harms that their systems of power have continuously afflicted on the Indigenous bodies and communities.
While Gallery Gachet, Defund 604, Justice For Jared and our community partners recognize that remembrance acts as a form of resistance, we are also aware that the struggle toward decolonization is all-encompassing and continues outside the gallery's wall; we firmly believe that we are not all free until ALL Indigenous and Black bodies are free.
Olumoroti George
Artistic Director
Demi London
Executive Director
