Watercolour on paper, 2020
Tisiga maintains a multidisciplinary practice that is rooted in painting and drawing but also draws from performance, photography, sculpture, and installation. His work reflects upon notions of identity and what contributes to this construct—community, nationality, family, history, location, real and imagined memories. Tisiga’s works look at cultural and social inheritance, the mundane, the metaphysical, and the mythological, often all at once and on the same surface. This conflation of interests and perspectives plays itself out in his visual narratives, which are distinctly non-linear, cross-cultural, and supernatural.
Joseph Tisiga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal and a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation. Tisiga recently held solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (East Lansing), the Audain Art Museum (Whistler), and Bradley Ertaskiran (Montréal). Other notable exhibitions include those at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, MASS MoCA (North Adams), the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe), and the West Vancouver Museum. Tisiga’s work is found in institutional collections as well as in numerous private and corporate collections. Tisiga is the recipient of the Yukon Art Prize (2021), the Sobey Art Award (2020), and the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (2017).