OTTAWA — I first encountered multidisciplinary artist Skawennati in person at her December 2019 talk at the former McLuhan Centre for Communication and Technology in Toronto. I recall that the artist wore Barbie-doll pink; I later learned that she is a Barbie fan. At the talk, Skawennati introduced herself as both an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and a cyberpunk avatar. She discussed her longtime practice of costuming avatars as a means of realizing Indigenous peoples’ self-determination in the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) — a thriving, futuristic island she maintains in the virtual world, Second Life. Later, she shared work-in-progress documentation for the project Calico & Camouflage (2020–22), a fashion line of Turtle Island “resistant wear” — her interpretation of traditional ribbon shirts and combat pants as Kanien’kehá:ka protest gear — for both avatars and IRL models. At the time, I was taken by Skawennati’s commitment to working within a massive multiplayer virtual world that was, in my view, a ghost town. She was adamant that if the platform were to “sunset,” she would stop making her avatars: “In the end, I know it’s not mine,” she shared with me in a 2020 interview for an Art in America profile. The Montreal-based artist utilizes these characters, as well as settings and backdrops she has built and designed in AbTeC, for her machinimas and machinimagraphs — films and photography produced within virtual worlds. “That’s why I take lots of pictures, lots of documentation. As long as you know you’re not actually in control, you have a lot of control.” Installation view of Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreahouse at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Foreground: the diptych “Dancing with Myself” (2015); background: “Birth of an Avatar (Homage to Mariko Mori)” (2017)Yet, as her current National Gallery of Canada (NGC) mid-career survey Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreamhouse proves, the trajectory of the past 25 years of her work lies not only in these machinimas and machinimagraphs, but also in her burgeoning work with fashion. The Calico & Camouflage collection was part of a turn in her understanding of the virtual as increasingly hybrid performative experiences involving garment-based sculptures and textiles. Within the NGC exhibition catalog, contributors Cheryl Sim and Mojean Sarah Behzadi make the case for how formative Skawennati’s engagement with fashion has been to her work overall. As exhibition curator Wahsontiio Cross, of the NGC, writes in the accompanying catalog, her creation of fashion and textiles has resulted in the artist finally “bring[ing] her idea of the future into the present.”The exhibition design for Welcome to the Dreamhouse, in which each room is perfectly structured for its intended purpose, is reminiscent of the Barbie Dreamhouse, aligning Skawennati’s multidisciplinary works with open-ended play. However, the artist clarified in conversation with Hyperallergic that she and Cross were drawn toward the “dreamhouse” concept for its aspirational potential. “A dreamhouse feels attainable. It might take work, but people think they can achieve it. I wanted to say with this show, this concept, this title, that a peaceful and just future is attainable.”Installation view of “Three Sisters: They Sustain Us” (2024), which includes the three-channel machinima, “Welcome to the Garden,” and the imagining of the three sisters as “Pre-Contact” (left) and “Colonization” (right) iterations.Among the longstanding themes that carry through the show, a core motif is Indigenous futurism, wherein the pain of the colonial past is worked through a “future imaginary.” The term, coined by Skawennati and her partner and frequent collaborator, Jason Edward Lewis, reclaims historical narratives and centers Indigenous peoples in “exploring new cultural configurations that will enable us not just to survive, but thrive.”Across different galleries, visitors encounter new and old characters from the artist’s moving and still image works. Many involve Indigenous sci-fi retellings of Hotinonshón:ni cosmology and histories, ranging from the creation story told in “She Falls For Ages” (2017) to the ancestral narrative of the Iroquois confederation, updated to the year 3025, in “The Peacemaker Returns” (2017).The NGC exhibition focuses on the artist’s recent forays into hybrid performative experiences with distinct components: machinimas or machinimagraphs featuring customized avatars that are transposed into live fashion shows and, eventually, installations that bring the machinimas and fashion together. “I do not have a prescribed pipeline,” Skawennati noted by email. “It just so happened that after making the outfits, I wanted to see their physical versions.” A highlight of this recent work is “Three Sisters,” which personifies the traditional Iroquois companion planting of corn, squash, and beans together. Imagined as Marvel-esque superheroes who moonlight as a Destiny’s Child-like girl group, the project is a good example of Skawennati’s recent garment-based sculptures, represented in this show with physical clothing displayed on mannequins. Installation view of “She Falls For Ages” alongside “Circle Wampum” and “Otsitsakáion Cosplay Costume” (all works 2017)Older machinimas, some originally presented as video installations in a white or black cube space, are immersive environments here. The nine-part machinima that composes “TimeTraveller™” (2007–14) is a decolonial interpretation of the histories of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. I first saw the work as a multi-channel video installation with wall-mounted tablets and headphones in a 2015 group exhibition at Toronto’s YYZ Artists’ Outlet. The current iteration recreates the luxurious living room of the young 22nd-century Mohawk power couple at the heart of the machinima’s multitemporal romance, recalling an installation approach in a 2015 solo exhibition at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. (In fact, the exhibition’s dreamhouse concept stems from the final episode of the machinima, when the couple encounters their potential new home.) Visitors can lounge on a white leather sectional, enjoying a continuous single-channel viewing of what still remains the artist’s opus. “TimeTraveller™” distills, within an Indigenous sci-fi love story, how self-determined virtual environments can center resistance within historical and futurist narratives. With this exhibition, Cross foregrounded the strong, powerful Kanien’kehá:ka women characters that have always been fundamental to Skawennati’s art. “I feel like I have been so close to her work and practice for many years, since I was a student,” said the curator, who is also from the Mohawk Nation of Kahnawà:ke. “Her work makes me very proud. Our culture is being put out there through her unique vision, and our stories are being perpetuated for these new generations in a way that can be shared with external Kahnawà:ke and Hotinonshón:ni communities.” The machinimagraphs “Ó:nenhste” (2022) and “Onon’ósera” (2022) as portraits from the series On the Occasion of the Three Sisters Accompanying xox on Her Visit to the QueenThere is a deliberate emphasis in Welcome to the Dreamhouse on alter-egos, beginning with “xox,” the artist’s cyberpunk avatar within AbTeC. xox stars in many of Skawennati’s machinimas and machinimagraphs, such as the diptych “Dancing with Myself” (2015), in which the artist also cosplays the avatar. The work hangs at the entryway of a fuchsia portrait gallery devoted to xox. Later on, visitors can engage with the rarely exhibited “Imagining Indians in the 25th Century.” The 2000 web-based interactive narrative features what is probably the earliest Skawennati alter-ego, a young, time-traveling mixed Kanien’kehá:ka and Italian woman who journals and “plays” digital dress up as historically significant Indigenous women, like Pocahontas and the Mohawk/Algonquin Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha. A newer machinima in the NGC exhibition includes “xox Visits the King” (2025), where xox meets with King Charles III, securing reparations and the return of crown land. Meanwhile, “Celestial Tree with Blossoms that Light the World” (2025), a “quilt constellation” inspired by a digital bedcover in her machinima “She Falls For Ages” (2017), closes the show. “As a very small child, my first love was textiles,” Skawennati explained. “Returning to it has been wonderful. There’s a language to textiles and fashion that is more decipherable to people than the language of machinima or computation.” While she remains proud of her machinimas and her digitally created avatars and virtual environments, she recognizes that their immateriality might have caused “a bit of distrust” among a general public turned off by the centralized power of tech oligarchs. And, with a clearer understanding of the impact and costs of server farms, data centers, and AI systems, she now recognizes her own distrust in a cyberspace that is no longer honoring its open source values. “I am so happy to make physical things again,” she said. “That’s actually the truth.”Installation view of Skawennati’s nine-part machinma, “TimeTraveller™ (2007–14) (photo Jennifer Park)Some of the garment-based sculptures featuring the fashion collection component of Calico & Camouflage (2020–22) A portrait gallery of various machinimagraphs featuring Skwennati’s cyberpunk avatar, xoxInstallation view of Skawennati’s machinima “xox Visits the King” (2025)Installation view of “Imagining Indians in the 25th Century” (2000)Installation view of the 12-piece fashion collection Three Sisters: Four Moments (2024), and, in the background, “Three Sisters: Reclaiming Abundance” (2023)Skawennati: Welcome to the Dreamhouse continues at the National Gallery of Canada (380 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario) through September 1. The exhibition was curated by Wahsontiio Cross.