The Power Plant

Jeneen Frei Njootli lives and works in their Vuntut Gwitchin homelands, in Old Crow, Yukon. There is an industrial and photo-adjacent focus in their practice, which incorporates culturally intimate materials that manifest in sculpture, regalia, performance and sound.

For their Fall 2025 exhibition at The Power Plant, Frei Njootli shows new and recent work that rethinks how representations of Indigenous life are produced and consumed. In the work Dreaming of new futures, greater empires have fallen, 2024, photographs of the artist’s body being covered incrementally by snow falling in a Yukon landscape are screen-printed with epoxy resin onto large sheets of steel. The printing process leaves only the faint impression of an image, lending the work a fugitive quality that is underscored by the unstable nature of the material, which is prone to corrosion and rust. Sometimes the artist aids this process along by spraying the surface of their works with vinegar and other substances. In so doing, they keep the work in a dynamic state of impermanence as it responds to fluctuations in light and heat. In other similar works, images of a beaded baby strap made by the artist together with family members are printed onto steel. Here, cultural belongings are represented indirectly through a process of deferral, a profound shift away from the objectified way they are exhibited under glass in museum settings. In all of these works there is a sense of concealment as a means of safeguarding; erasure registered as loss but also protection.

The artist has also used works from this series in sound performances, singing to the resonant body of steel and creating complex soundscapes with contact microphones and effects pedals. In other performances they have used caribou antlers and Ski-Doo hoods as “sound tools.” These performances enact a politics of refusal, permeating the gallery with uncontained sound, shaking the walls while leaving temporary images in accumulations of dust on the gallery floor.

Jeneen Frei Njootli: The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze will also include textile-based sculptural works. Found objects resonant with stories of living on and from the land—a drill, a rifle, a ptarmigan wing tucked into the fold of a mitt—have been draped in tarps, hides, and floral scarves and dipped in resin, a process that allows fabric to harden and keep its shape. Items of clothing worn by the artist or close family members are similarly preserved. These are works that cite a long history of artists intentionally working with materials that evoke specific personal and cultural references, from David Hammons to James Luna. In Frei Njootli’s case, they relate directly to the community they live and work in—the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation—speaking of ancestral memory, the transfer of knowledge systems, labour, love, kinship, and land relations.

About the Artist
Jeneen Frei Njootli’s work has been presented in many galleries, museums, and artist-run centres around the world. Recent exhibitions include: Noise of the Flesh: Score for gina pane, Frac des Pays de la Loire, France (2023–24); Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, curated by Candice Hopkins, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2023); I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality, UB Art Galleries, Buffalo (2022–23); Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg (2020–21); 2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, New York (2021–22); Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes, Anchorage Museum (2021); Where Do We Go From Here?, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020–21); and Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Kathy Slade, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2020–21). Selected group exhibitions, biennales, and conferences include: the Anchorage Museum, Alaska (2020); the Toronto Biennial of Art (2020); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018–19); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016–18), among others. Frei Njootli holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BFA from Emily Carr University. They are represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in Vancouver.