Biography

Fallon Simard’s memes and videos capture the conflicts created by colonialism, land, politics, and capitalism. The artist creates moving and still images as an embodied and visceral response to Indigenous identity that dispels current tropes of Indigeneity. Simard’s work instead investigates intensity and burden as products of injustice(s), human rights violations, and colonial violence. In his videos and memes, Simard illustrates bad feelings and harms from different Indigenous contexts to reveal new modes and effects of colonial-capital-racial policy. Simard’s work mobilizes grief, intensity, and trauma as mitigation tools to colonial-capital policy. ​He additionally creates policy recommendations into legislation, services, programs, and organizations.

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Abstract

Simard produces art and research regarding intensity, burden, bad feelings, and the colonial capital-racial contexts that have created both the TRC and the National Inquiry (NI).  Simard's work illustrates a problematized national narrative of Indigenous Canadian relations.​ The objective of Simard’s artistic and research production is to advance theory regarding Indigeneity, mental health, culture, and politics. The framework for both  artistic and research production is centered in Indigenous-colonial and cultural theory.

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Artistic and Research Questions

Both the TRC and the NI track a state of consciousness comprised of grief, threat, and burden. Future endeavors for Simard into both art and research will ask the following questions:

1. How is a state of grief embodied?

2. How is burden and purpose engaged with in the Indigenous-Canadian consciousness?

3. What are the threats to the relationship between Indigenous Nations and Colonial Governments?