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Ace’s Digital wiigwaas-mkak (2017-2019) is included in the exhibition Love Medicine (June 12 to November 1, 2026) curated by Dr. Michelle McGeough at the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina, Saskatchewan).

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Love Medicine aims to create a space of recognition and community, offering an artistic embrace in response to the historical traumas inflicted by the settler nation-state on 2Spirit/Indigiqueer bodies.

This exhibition is founded on the belief that love, expressed through artistic acts, is a powerful force for healing and affirmation. It features approximately 22 Indigenous 2SLGBTQIA+ artists whose works touch on various time periods and regions, and explore love as healing, community and belonging, affirmation and embrace, and resilience and identity.

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Birchbark baskets incorporating porcupine quillwork are distinctive material culture vessels of the Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes. These birchbark vessels are often embellished with complex geometric, figurative or floral motifs assembled with dyed and natural porcupine quills and trimmed with sweetgrass. In Digital wiigwaas-mkak (2017-2019), Ace references these traditional vessels, but intentionally disrupts them through the integration of his signature electronic component work. The integration of glass beads with electronic components—resistors, capacitors, and light-emitting diodes—forms intricate floral motifs inspired by Anishinaabe beadwork traditions and medicinal healing plants. Together, these materials create a powerful metaphor for individual and collective healing: both beads and electronic components possess the capacity to store, transmit, and release energy. The circuitry-inspired patterns can be read as a living, functioning system—one that mirrors our interconnected 2SLGBTQIA+ community, perpetually vulnerable to disruption, malfunction, fracture, and attack. Yet within these networks resides the potential for repair and renewal. Like the circuitry that must continually adapt to maintain connection, 2Spirited and Indigiqueer communities have long embodied perseverance, ingenuity, and resilience in the face of historical and ongoing adversity. Through acts of care, love, kinship, and resistance, 2SLGBTQIA+ continue to mend these ruptures, transforming sites of damage into pathways of healing and ensuring our collective survivance for future generations.

In a unique twist of materiality for this work, Ace deliberately juxtaposes porcupine quillwork with strips of colour-coated telecommunication wire simulating naturally sourced porcupine quills along the rim of the basket’s lid. Sweetgrass trim that would normally embellish the birchbark basket is also disrupted and supplemented by the twisted coated telecommunication wire that is segmented by short intervals of copper wire. Both sweetgrass and copper are sacred medicines of the Anishinaabeg. Ace’s contemporary approach to materiality is defined by his distinctive integration of coated telecommunication wire as quillwork and braided sweetgrass. It is this new signature refinement in Ace’s work that further enriches his unique toolbox of contemporary source materials consisting of capacitors, resistors and light emitting diodes.

For more information on the exhibition Love Medicine.

For more information on the development of the Love Medicine exhibition see Museum Queeries.

Dr. Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Concordia University. Prior to this position, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her PhD in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Her research interests have focused on the indigenous two-spirit identity. Presently she is working on a manuscript that examines Indigenous understandings of gender fluidity and the impact these notions have on artistic production. Other areas of her research include the application of Indigenous research methodologies and the incorporation of these ways of knowing into the development of curriculum and the curation of contemporary and historic Indigenous art.