Maria Hupfield and Karen Tam: Snip, Cut, Stitch, Slice
May 10 to June 22, 2023
Maria Hupfield and Karen Tam: Snip, Cut, Stitch, Slice
Meet the artists May 20 from 3 to 5PM
Galerie Hugues Charbonneau is proud to present, Snip, Cut, Stitch, Slice, an exhibition on material and process featuring new and recent works by Maria Hupfield and Karen Tam. Spanning the past 20 years both artists have developed individual practices that bind the contemporary hand-made object to cultural value in relationships of deep exploration, experimentation, and play. Hupfield’s dynamic practice merges performance art and industrial felt sculptures with hand sewing techniques to imagine new relationships between the body, the everyday and the art object, while Tam’s works draw from Chinese Canadian histories, using embroidered banners and weavings to explore community identity. Together, the artists offer a range of approaches in a rich and thought-provoking dialogue between their works.
Maria Hupfield, “Bone + Blood”, 2016 Céramique et frange rouge Ceramic with red fringe 50,8 x 12,7 x 10,2 cm (20” x 5” x 4”)
About Maria Hupfield
Transdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield crosses boundaries at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. Her work positions the art object as active belongings where sculptures become performers in a form of object choreography between artist, audience, and art gallery. Engaged in an ongoing series of relations with community, places, ideas, and materials her influences include: Robert Morris, Simone Forti, Lydia Clark, Yoku Ono, James Luna, Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Belmore, and Rebecca Horn. An Urban off-reservation member of the Anishinaabek People belonging to Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario, Hupfield is deeply invested in embodied practice, Native Feminisms, and ethical collaborative process. Her art has been exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, The Power Plant, The Heard Museum, the NOMAM in Zurich, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Galerie de L’UQAM, the New York Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, the New York Museum of Art and Design, BRIC House Gallery, the Bronx Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Site Santa Fe, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada.
Karen Tam + Maria Hupfield, “Snip, Cut, Stitch, Slice”, (vue d’installation / installation shot), 2023 Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montréal, Canada
About Karen Tam
Through her sculptures and installation work, Karen Tam looks at how the corporeal experience of space allows one to understand its history and community. A deep engagement with archival and collections research has led her to question whose histories get to be collected and told, and to interrogate the narratives that have been constructed around the Chinese diaspora. She asks: “How do we remember, represent, support, and simultaneously deny the erasures of our stories, spaces, and community? If there are minimal traces of the existence of an individual or organization, what are ways that this life can be made visible again?” By actively bringing to light overlooked aspects of Chinese Canadian communities and culture through her artwork, her intent is to create counterpoints to accepted canons, official histories, public archives and collections. Her solo exhibition “Swallowing Mountains” is currently on view at the McCord Stewart Museum.
