Tom Mcleod is a Gwich’in and Inuvialuk artist born in the Mackenzie River Delta and raised in Akłarvik, Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT. His photography is complemented by his multimedia installation work and his podcasting practice. Mcleod began creating from an early age. By age 11, the multilingual book he co-authored with Mindy Willett, Le Delta, c’est mon chez moi | The Delta Is My Home | Ehdiitat shanankat t'agoonch'uu Uvanga Nunatarmuitmi aimayuaqtunga (2008), was published, and Mcleod became a frequent guest on CBC Radio North [1].
Untitled (Toronto at Night) (2019) is a good example of the moody, hazy lighting Mcleod often employs in his urban photography. A row of street lamps cast bursts of white over a road glowing with evening dampness. Mcleod’s mastery of composition is evident in the gothic spire of Queen’s Park, framed in the distance by the lines of the road converging, with a welcomingly lit door contrasting with the menacingly spiked top in darkness.
Mcleod has written and photographed for
Tusaayaksat magazine and, in 2015, was a producer at Tusaayaksat TV [2]. He took part in a week-long intensive artmaking workshop at Concordia University in Montreal, QC, as part of a collaborative production between the Indigenous Futures research cluster of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, and the GLAM Collective (short for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). One outcome of the workshop was the collaborative visual art installation Mcleod was involved in,
Memory Keepers/Gardiens des mémoires, which was featured at Nuit Blanche 2019 [3]. He is a co-curator and exhibitor of
between ice & earth (2019) at the Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto, ON, and led a podcasting workshop in March 2019 through the OCAD Indigenous Student Association. In summer 2019, Mcleod was among the delegation led by Heather Igloliorte that travelled to Venice to witness Isuma at the Venice Biennale. His photographic travel journal of the trip was featured in the
IAQ’s special issue on Venice. Mcleod is currently completing his degree at OCAD in Toronto.