Bio

Video maker, performance and installation artist Zachery Cameron Longboy, born in Churchill, Manitoba, of the Sayisi Dene lineage, brings a deeply felt, hybridity-layered perspective to his work. His videos often use his complex performance and installations as a departure point.

Longboy is nationally honoured and widely shown in Private and public venues and public collections. Surrey Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Glenbow Museum (Calgary), and The Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa).

Works

Eating Lunch

  • 1992
  • Zachery Longboy

An experimental video meditation exploring the artist’s position and placement in white culture. Continuing his search for identity within a fractured cultural environment, the artist reflects on his history of dislocation and negotiates with the boundaries that include aspects from within both the dominate White society and First Nations history and culture.

eating lunch

confirmation of my sins

  • 1995
  • Zachery Longboy

There are many memories of childhood that have slipped through the cracks. Most that I can recollect were of the differences in myself in comparison to the others around. Taken away at one week of age from my Indian community and given to a white foster family, my experience of the authentic Indian and where my placement is, within this dream of authenticity, comes from an infected locale.

confirmation of my sins

water into fire

  • 1994
  • Zachery Longboy

Longboy outs himself as a First Nations FAG - who is living with HIV - hoping to sever attached preconception of two spirited peoples. In a contemplative search, the artist recollects how HIV/AIDS has affected him and his surrounding community, revealing a strength through loss.

water into fire

Living Tree

  • 1993
  • Zachery Longboy

YOU ME HIV AIDS RESPONSIBILITY REALITY a public service announcement for HIV/AIDS awareness. we will walk the land, breathe the air and drink from the stream. i came across the living tree, branches flowing in the breeze its roots adhering to mother earth YOU ME HIV AIDS RESPONSIBILITY REALITY

Living Tree

From Another Time Comes One

  • 1990
  • Zachery Longboy

Dedicated to the artist’s father, this experimental tape begins sorting through identities contaminated by the generalized racism of white society and its degrading commercial exploitation of Native culture, i.e., “Indian” drums and doll souvenirs. Five young natives search for reconnection to their families, their stories, traditions and their role within community.

From Another Time Comes One