“To share a story is more than retelling; it is work and a methodology. Joanne Archibald defines storywork as an experiential approach of learning by feeling, thinking, and doing; as an embodied process. For this exhibit I have selected artworks to share my approach to performance art and making as storywork, from nearly a decade when I lived in BRKLYN, (2010-19).”
– Maria Hupfield
Storywork is the third experimental undertaking of Maria Hupfield at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau. The title of this exhibition is about carrying living knowledge through our actions, clothing, words and how we live. The items in the gallery are both sculptures and live performance components, activated by the artist’s touch. Pieces such as Our Relations in 4 Directions, Double Punch, Backward Double Spiral Jingle Boots and Silver Tongue Taste of Progress were tools for connection in New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Santa Fe, and Phoenix before landing in Montreal. This new activation combines the energy of living with the balance of movement, action, sound, strength, and hope as essential components in the creation of meaning making.
Conversation: Towards the Sun, May 7th at 5pm
Presented by CYAI2021, the Indigenous Encounters 2021: Art, Culture and Design of the Americas
Join us for a conversation with artist Maria Hupfield and poet Natalie Diaz as they visit and discuss the intersections between their work with the body and text in relation to Hupfield’s current exhibition Storywork at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau and Diaz latest poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem. They will also introduce The Felt Sessions, a weekly series of makers and thinkers scheduled for July 2021.
Artist statement
Transdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield activates her creations in live performances. She is interested in the production of shared moments that open spaces for possibility and new narratives. In her work, these moments of connection are recalled and grounded by coded and re-coded hand-sewn industrial felt creations and other material mash-ups worn on the body. An Urban off-reservation member of the Anishinaabek People she belongs to Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario, Hupfield is deeply invested in embodied practice, Native Feminisms, collaborative processes, craft and textiles.
Biography
Maria Hupfield is a 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow for her project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, and was awarded the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada 2018. Previous projects at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau included her 2014 Performance Lab and 2017 transdisciplinary installation Stay Golden. She has exhibited and performed her work through her touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant) 2017-2018, and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020. Amongst other places, she has also presented her work at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, 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, and the National Gallery of Canada. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan, and a founding member of the Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC.