Uploaded February 2018 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
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Sandra Semchuk is a 2018 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Directed by Anthony Grieco
Co-production of the Canada Council for the Arts and Red Mammoth Media. Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."
For more information, visit: ggavma.canadacouncil.ca
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Transcript:
These days when I visit my cousins they’ll say to me “Sandra you’re beginning to look like Baba.”
Baba was the matriarch of the family, my grandmother, Sophia Zenoka.
She came over from the Ukraine when she was about fourteen.
She’s the one who taught me about how to move out of denial, and how to look at things in a straight way.
And I really believe that one grandmother can alter generations and generations and generations.
I’m Sandra Semchuk, and I’m a photographer.
I had been doing self-portraits for some time because I was interested in the nature of change.
I began to do what I called ‘cooperative self-portraits’ where I would work with my daughter for example, Rowenna.
She sometimes would have the shutter release and sometimes I would.
But there was a dialogue, a kind of negotiation of identity between the two of us.
I had the opportunity to see these amazing images that the bison stewards were making by leaving cameras in places where the bison continually go.
So the bison were making their own photographs.
I worked with the bison stewards and we edited them, so that as the audience moved by, they would get a sense of the changing season and the moving of the bison.
James Nicholas was from Nelson House, Manitoba. He and I were husband and wife.
We saw our marriage as a kind of articulation of the struggle with colonization.
Part of what we tried to do in our collaboration was to show how we were learning from each other, how we were reaching across cultures to cross that kind of pain that we each felt from our own cultures and our own histories.
‘Taking off Skins’ was a performative piece that James did.
He took off the businessman’s suit and he took off that noose, that tie that he wore as a liaison between government and his own nation. And he walked into the water to cleanse himself, and he put on a bear claw necklace that he had skinned.
He was trying to come to terms with his ten years in residential school.
I grew up in Northern Saskatchewan around the Meadow Lake area, where there were these huge projections on bears.
How would I come to see the bear for who the bear was?
I had my camera trained on the ears of this female grizzly bear.
She began this kind of dialogue with us, this negotiation with us to come closer to us, and you had that sense that kind of cross-species dialogue was possible.
How do we come to know across species, as well as across cultures – how do we come to know someone else, without projections…
Please like this video and subscribe to support the arts in Canada.
Sandra Semchuk is a 2018 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Directed by Anthony Grieco
Co-production of the Canada Council for the Arts and Red Mammoth Media. Presentation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Independent Media Arts Alliance.
The Canada Council for the Arts is a federal, arm's-length Crown corporation created by an Act of Parliament in 1957 (Canada Council for the Arts Act) "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts."
For more information, visit: ggavma.canadacouncil.ca
****
Transcript:
These days when I visit my cousins they’ll say to me “Sandra you’re beginning to look like Baba.”
Baba was the matriarch of the family, my grandmother, Sophia Zenoka.
She came over from the Ukraine when she was about fourteen.
She’s the one who taught me about how to move out of denial, and how to look at things in a straight way.
And I really believe that one grandmother can alter generations and generations and generations.
I’m Sandra Semchuk, and I’m a photographer.
I had been doing self-portraits for some time because I was interested in the nature of change.
I began to do what I called ‘cooperative self-portraits’ where I would work with my daughter for example, Rowenna.
She sometimes would have the shutter release and sometimes I would.
But there was a dialogue, a kind of negotiation of identity between the two of us.
I had the opportunity to see these amazing images that the bison stewards were making by leaving cameras in places where the bison continually go.
So the bison were making their own photographs.
I worked with the bison stewards and we edited them, so that as the audience moved by, they would get a sense of the changing season and the moving of the bison.
James Nicholas was from Nelson House, Manitoba. He and I were husband and wife.
We saw our marriage as a kind of articulation of the struggle with colonization.
Part of what we tried to do in our collaboration was to show how we were learning from each other, how we were reaching across cultures to cross that kind of pain that we each felt from our own cultures and our own histories.
‘Taking off Skins’ was a performative piece that James did.
He took off the businessman’s suit and he took off that noose, that tie that he wore as a liaison between government and his own nation. And he walked into the water to cleanse himself, and he put on a bear claw necklace that he had skinned.
He was trying to come to terms with his ten years in residential school.
I grew up in Northern Saskatchewan around the Meadow Lake area, where there were these huge projections on bears.
How would I come to see the bear for who the bear was?
I had my camera trained on the ears of this female grizzly bear.
She began this kind of dialogue with us, this negotiation with us to come closer to us, and you had that sense that kind of cross-species dialogue was possible.
How do we come to know across species, as well as across cultures – how do we come to know someone else, without projections…
