Using materials sourced from the earth, the artists in How can I know you? work to share site-specific knowledge about kinship and generational relations, industry and settlement, social and political histories tied to settler nationalism and institutions, and about Indigenous territories in dialogue with one another.

How can I know you? is a question that comes from a comment artist Panya Clark Espinal shared during a studio visit with curator Suzanne Morrissette. It is a question that Clark Espinal asks of her materials, both as a way of coming to know them, as well as coming to know people, place, and history through the act of engaging with materials. It is a question that supposes the liveliness and agency of these materials and their capacity to share and convey knowledge.

This question guides the exhibition with a suggestion that the way we learn imparts an opportunity of acquaintance with possibility. It suggests that one’s approach to getting to know someone, or something, can influence the nature of that future relationship and the degree to which we are able to acknowledge and validate that which lies outside of our own experiences. Thinking about art practices that highlight the animacy of clay and land-based materials can, in this way, support a discussion about how we understand relationships between human and non-human beings, and the unique social and political contexts in which we are not only situated but with which we are in relation. This is an ethic of learning that is rooted in understandings of the animacy of the land and of our own states of belonging, of being out-of-place, or, of being in complex relations of power and history in an ever-changing world.