(West Moberly First Nations)

Dion Smith-Dokkie is a painter and visual artist who lives and works in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Treaty 8. Their work deals with translation, mutation, infrastructure, morphology, and the process of finding what is inside and outside. Mediation and translation are key operations in their practice, where they undertake experiments with interface phenomena, mutation, envelopes, and media skins in the fields of painting, drawing, and video.

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They hold an MFA in Visual Arts from UBC, a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia, and a BA Humanities (Women’s Studies) from UVIC. In 2025, Smith-Dokkie received the PLATFORM Centre Photography Award and has a forthcoming solo exhibition there in March 2026. They are a member of West Moberly First Nations and grew up in the Peace Region of northeast BC and northwest Alberta.

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Artist Statement:

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In summer 2025, I took part in a month-long artist residency in Demmitt, AB, run by Peter von Tiesenhausen and Maggie Tiesenhausen called CommonOpulence. Our group spent one month living outdoors and coming to terms with the legacy of utopian intentional communities of the 60s and 70s, ‘frontier placemaking’ and place-enforced contingency; to commune under the auspices of a common and locale under examination. It was deeply healing. These works were first presented at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in the group exhibition, wishcraft.
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These works use paint I made: rice paste and a bespoke beeswax emulsion, along with watercolour, gouache and pigment. I wanted to draw out a new visual language from material and place. I undertook this research-creation in response to a question posed by a kind curator at a studio visit, where I was asked to question the primacy and ubiquity of plastic (acrylic) in my other works, to think through how to mitigate its impacts. I brought a Fresnel lens with me and would record the aspen parkland, the path to the swimming hole; the garden and clover; the sky and passing clouds.
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These works mark a departure and critical re-evaluation of my past painting practice. Radically simplified forms respond to the pre-given shapes and divisions in the support surface, divisions that resemble the parcelling out of those northern prairies and parkland and the works oscillate between aerial and horizon-directed gazes. A brushy facture deploys distortions from the fresnel lens. Meanwhile, the judicious, sparse application of materials create a space for a more economical, ponderous hand, more implicated than ever in creating the materials it uses, whose limited palette tends towards soft dawn in contrast to smoky, atmospheric-blue support surfaces.
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The chamois suede I encountered early on in the residency became my lodestar: stern divisions of the picture plane matter less when perforated by minimum escape capsules: panels of sky, cloud, and aquatic moments that turn each parcel into a window, a partialness that denotes its corresponding vista (a reflection shared by artist Rebecca Bair in a studio visit). . As a support, the patchwork resonates because I arrived to it in media res, to the grids, sections, divisions, finding a way through.
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Elsewhere, I view my practice as a vessel between translation and mutation: recording on the one hand, escaping on the other. These works critique this escapist impulse and approach the longstanding concern of my practice—the uni-binity of body and environment along with the process of interface and determining what is inside and outside—from an ethos of soft, attentive insulation and inhabitation.
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I adapt the work titles from a short story about two Wyoming buckaroos: their long-range, leaden love is perforated by omnipresent wind, daunting prairie and piercing mountain ranges: it reminds me of where I live. These airy daydreams sail across the plains of the work. More personally, the show is about returning home, where the sky is at its widest.