Destiny Chescappio
Rezborgs and RezBorg 0.5_Fancy Dancer
Rezborgs, 2023, digital prints, series of 4, 18” × 24” each.
Rezborgs, 2023, digital prints, series of 4, 18” × 24” each.
About the project
This series of digitally painted portraits, Rezborgs, envisions Indigenous cyborg figures through the lens of Rez culture and Indigenous futurism. “Rez,” a colloquial term for First Nations Reserves, is central to Chescappio’s work and her experiences growing up in the Northern community of the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach. She imagines “Rezborgs” as part-human, part-robot beings, bringing together customary iconography, urban Indigenous aesthetics, and science fiction visual language. Through this synthesis, familial figures and experiences from the Rez are transformed into speculative portraits that imagine Indigenous futures.
For the artist, Rez culture encompasses the humour, relationships, resilience, and sense of community that arise from life on the reserve. It also reflects the histories and conditions that shape reserve communities, such as the ongoing impacts of colonialism, the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands, and the social, geographic, and economic isolation resulting from colonial policies and infrastructures. The Rezborgs emerge from this context while refusing to be defined by it. Instead, they draw on the everyday relationships and personalities that make up community life: “The rez uncle, the young cousin that likes to hang out with you, and then there’s the tradish cousin that goes to the pow wows.”
The series also challenges colonial conventions in landscape painting and Indigenous portraiture. Canadian painting traditions have often depicted Indigenous lands as “pristine” and uninhabited, erasing the communities who have long lived in and cared for these territories. Similarly, portraiture has often reduced indigenous subjects to idealized or stereotypical figures associated with the past. In contrast, these works reclaim portraiture as a place for self-determination, imagination and futurity. By combining Indigenous iconography with science-fiction aesthetics, Chescappio creates work that celebrates, reimagines, and even self-romanticizes her community, affirming Indigenous presence in both the present and the futures yet to come.
Rezborgs, 2023, digital prints, triptych, 18” × 24” each.
RezBorg 0.5_Fancy Dancer presents a 3D-rendered Anishnabeg character model done on Nomad Sculpt, expanding Chescappio’s RezBorg series into a three-dimensional exploration. The figure is modelled in the likeness of the artist’s mother, bringing her personal and familial relationships at the centre of her practice and situating them within speculative Indigenous futures.
The dancer’s futuristic adornments are inspired by Indigenous visual traditions and the artist's cultural heritage, integrating familial motifs with digital aesthetics. Rather than presenting technology as separate from Indigenous culture, Chescappio envisions it as a way to carry culture, family, and knowledge forward.
Through 3D modelling and digital art, Chescappio extends Indigenous visual culture in a contemporary, speculative context. The work presents an intimate vision of the future, where family, culture, and technology remain interconnected.
Biography
Destiny Chescappio is a member of the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach with mixed Algonquin from Kitigan Zibi. She holds a BFA in Computation Arts from Concordia University. She completed her DEC at LaSalle College (2019) and has done an artist residency at her community's school, Jimmy Sandy Memorial School in Kawawachikamach. She has also previously worked with the Indigenous production company, Rezolution Pictures. Her artistic mediums such as 3D art, animation, graphic design, and digital painting, explore the themes of Indigenous Futurism combining the complexities of historical, modern, and futuristic topics.
