| Summary: | Canada 150 was the 2017 federally-driven anniversary event of the confederation of Canada. The official language in promotional material referred to confederation as a "mark." Use of this word signifies the event's contention, and its attempt to evade celebratory associations with the atrocities of colonialism. Many Canada 150 events attempted to critique confederacy and Canadian identity as implicitly enfolded in the colonial project. One of which was LandMarks2017, a nation-wide art project, where twelve artists produced works within sites mandated by Parks Canada. Paramount to this project was a gesture of marking land, a demarcation that draws attention to the politicization of land as a tool of erasure and dominance. This thesis examines LandMarks2017 through two case studies, examining its curatorial frame, and how it comes into contact with the official state-mandated structure of Canada 150. In doing so, it attends to the incorporation of anti-colonialism into federal nation-building in Canada. This thesis will do so in two parts: the first examining these frameworks alongside an analysis of the legislative and land use systems of the sites in which the works were produced. The second part of this thesis will provide a detailed examination of the form and content of the case studies, dealing with them in terms of ephemerality and materiality as an entry point into questions surrounding land-based practices. The case studies discussed are Jin Me-Yoon's Long View and Maureen Gruben's Stitching My Landscape. Yoon's was sited on Long Beach within the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, off the coast of mainland British Columbia. Gruben's project was installed within Pingo Canadian Landmark, near the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. Throughout this thesis, these works will be examined as contesting the settler colonial frame of Parks Canada in order to posit them as anti-colonial acts through their attention to territorial complexities.
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