Presented in partnership with the Khyber Centre for the Arts and Nocturne
Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax presents No Dominion/No Domain, where Eva Grant and Curtis Botham trace land, life, labour, and pathways across speculative digital ancestral architectures and charcoal industrial landscapes.
“Homeless Shelters Before Police Raid” by Curtis Botham
No Dominion/No Domain brings together two artists, Eva Grant and Curtis Botham, whose works reflect on land, labour, infrastructure, and ecological movement. Presented by Mayworks Kjipuktuk/Halifax and hosted at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, the exhibition runs October 11-31, 2025. Events include Nocturne: Art at Night Festival from 6PM-12AM on Saturday, October 18, and a closing reception Tuesday, October 28th 6PM-8PM.
Eva Grant’s WILD INTERFACE is a work of St’át’imc speculative futurism that reimagines longhouses and Salish structures as though assembled from salmon bones. These digital works depict architecture not as idealized pasts or utopian elsewheres, but as living interfaces: porous inter-species networks where technologies and ancestral knowledge converge. Through computational geography and postnatural territories, Grant reconsiders space and place as co-constructed with ecologies, where memory and labours of love entwine.
Curtis Botham’s Effluents and Urban projects confront the landscapes of extraction that underpin industrial modernity. His large-scale charcoal drawings—made in a volatile medium that mirrors the precarity of his subject matter—document the sites of resource economies on Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia and their cascading impacts: inequities of wealth, the precarity of workers, and the hidden infrastructures behind everyday consumer life. Botham traces these environments with stark fidelity, inviting viewers to recognize their own embeddedness in these cycles of labour and consumption.
Together, Grant’s and Curtis’ works stage a dialogue on dominion—over land, life, and labour—and on domains, whether in digital terrains of speculative ancestral architectures or in the charcoal-rendered landscapes and machinery of industrial capitalism.
No Dominion/No Domain invokes the dual refusal of control and possession within colonial constructs and systems. The title, created by Grant, arose in response to the effectiveness of messaging between the blend of analog and virtual material. Through charcoal and digital works, the exhibition resists the illusion of permanence that dominion or domain implies. Charcoal, itself the residue of combustion, unsettles the idea of industry as stable progress, while Grant’s architectures utilize the digital realm to glitch and dissolve systemically oppressive boundaries. Both practices gesture towards knowledge, labour, and survival beyond grids of ownership.
Digital piece from the WILD INTERFACE series by Eva Grant
ARTIST BIOS:
Eva Grant is a Queer, St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, curator, and new media artist. She studied philosophy and literature at Stanford University and is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures. Her world-building practice hybridizes moving image, animation, game engines, interactive digital media, data visualization, and speculative design to prototype decolonial and capacious futures. She is a former Sundance Native Lab fellow, a BIPOC TV & Film Episodic Writers Lab participant, an Artengine NEW SUNS Worldbuilding Lab artist-in-residence, a Vancouver Queer Film Festival Programming Disruptor, a Netflix-BANFF Diversity of Voices fellow, an Art Gallery of Ontario AGO x RBC emerging artist-in-residence, and an alumna of the imagineNATIVE Originals Commission program and the Screenwriting Shorts Fellowship. Her work has been supported by Mayworks Kjipuktuk, Nocturne: Art at Night, CFC Satellites, Debaser/Pique Festival, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, Lay*Away, Black Star Film Festival’s William and Louise Greaves Filmmaking Seminar, and the Ottawa Animation Festival, and her films have screened at festivals around the world.
Curtis Botham is an award-winning artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He graduated from NSCAD University in 2017 with a bachelor of fine arts. His accolades include the Canada Games Young Artist of Excellence Award, and numerous grants from Arts Nova Scotia and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Since 2017, he has depicted the impact and labour of industries in the Maritimes, examining the social and environmental effects of material culture on our lives. He has participated in residencies around Nova Scotia in order to create a broad portrait of the province and its relationship to its land, people and resources.
curtisbotham.weebly.com
HOURS & EVENTS:
Exhibition on view: October 11-31, 2025
Gallery hours: 12-5PM Tuesday-Saturday + events
Appointments/contact: info@khyber.ca
Accessibility notes: www.khyber.ca/access
Nocturne hours: 6PM-12AM, Saturday, October 18, 2025
Closing reception: Tuesday, October 28th 6PM-8PM – Click here for details
