In her first Montréal solo exhibition since 2021, Maria Hupfield returns with three bodies of work that challenge the limits of sculpture and boldly reaffirm its relationship to performance.
A transdisciplinary artist, Maria’s practice operates at the intersections of design, visual arts, and performance – ever in becoming and always building upon itself. In a style all her own, she refuses the canonical frameworks that divide the body from its environment and reveals the shapeshifting potentiality of material engagement.
For this exhibition, which reunites work from Mashkiki is Movement, The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan), and the Campbell House Museum, Maria offers a trifecta of image-based pieces, wearable sculpture, and structural activations with familiar deployments of felt and tin jingles. As they cycle between activated forms and two-dimensional representations, her works transgress medial boundaries in a playful refusal of staticity. Carrying traces of their past, Maria’s pieces insist on liveliness beyond the present moment. And in so doing, they reveal the artificial conceit of our separation with the objects we create.
In a nod to her first collaboration with Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (Performance Lab, 2013) and in anticipation of her forthcoming curatorial project Encore at PHI (Nov. 2026), Maria has invited Rosy Simas and Olivia Shortt to perform with her at the vernissage. Marking a new level of maturity in the artist’s career, Maria Hupfield: Sculpture is an invitation to discover the breadth of her practice and to connect with emerging lines of research as she develops work for an increasingly international public.
Biography
Maria Hupfield is an artist, researcher and urban Anishinaabe belonging to Wasauksing First Nation (Robinson Huron Treaty). She is the Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto Missisauga, where her work foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies in art-making and critical accountability practices. A cofounder of Native Arts Department International alongside her husband and artist Jason Lujan, Maria is deeply invested in embodied practice, Indigenous feminisms, and ethical collaborative processes.
Her art has been presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario, Power Plant, National Gallery of Canada, NONAM – Nordamerika Native Museum Zurich, National Museum of the American Indian, Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Wexner Centre for the Arts, Toronto Biennial of Art, and SITE Santa Fe among others. She was a 2025 recipient of the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.