Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Sesemiya

Dionne Lee

Please join us to celebrate CAG's summer 2023 exhibitions, *Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill: M******, *Sesemiya: s7ulh waḵáy̓stn iy ta stamsh cht*, and *Dionne Lee: Ratios*. The artists will be in attendance.

All ages welcome. Cash bar.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

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Process image 2 (cropped), Gabe Hill.png

Summer 2023

Opening Reception

The sculptural work of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill explores the fallacies embedded in colonial concepts of property, economy and family. Her works frequently frame Western systems of capitalism and control as both imposed and impermanent, emphasizing the endurance, power and radical potential of other surviving knowledges and economic practices. Often engaging the physical, historical or symbolic properties of the materials she works with, past projects have seen Hill variously use tobacco, found objects and deaccessioned museum artifacts to consider questions of labour, land, value, and reciprocity.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Hill presents *M******, a project that deepens the artist’s long-term inquiry into structures of kinship. Bringing together a suite of new works in sculpture, drawing and cameraless cinema, the exhibition sees Hill reflecting expansively on economies of parenting and reproductive labour. Harnessing references ranging from spores and parasites to Nadya “Octomom” Suleman, these works gesture toward an experience of motherhood that is multiplicitous, non-linear and visceral, both bound to and more than the limits and binaries frequently invoked by the word “Mother.”

#### Biography
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is an artist and writer. Her practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the 59th Venice Biennale; Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon; and Gallery TPW, Toronto. She is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective that seeks to challenge Eurocentric art models, and to centre the land and Indigenous epistemologies. Hill is Cree and English, with maternal roots in the Michel Band and Papaschase. She lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ Nations.


CAG Summer 2023 Program Guide - Web.pdf

CAG - Gabe Hill - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - Web.pdf

CAG - Gabe Hill - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - Web.pdf

Several strips of hand-treated pint film with holes like cigarette burns are displayed on a white surface.

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Process image, Gabe Hill.jpg

Two wire sculptures that stand slanted, with mobiles build into the top. Strawberries and pictures cut out from magazines hang from the wires.

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01 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

Paper cutouts and a strawberries hang from thin metal wires.

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02 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

Paper cutouts and a strawberry hang from thin metal wires.

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03 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

Paper cutouts, including a woman's face, hang from a latice of thin metal wires, with clear plastic doilies threaded around several joints.

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04 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

Paper cutouts hang from thin metal wires, most prominently a photo of a woman's face.

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05 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

Framed collage with a smeared pink background and small images cut out from magazines arranged in swirls.

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06 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

Paper cutouts hang from thin metal wires in the foreground, with a framed pink collage in the background.

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07 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

A framed collage with a pink background and drawn lines concentrically repeating edges of the collage into the centre of the image.

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Three framed pink collages on a white wall.

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A framed collage with a pink background with small burn holes running up and down collage in columns.

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Two framed pink collages on a white wall perpendicular to a doorway leading into a dark room with a sculpture made of stacked chairs supporting a film projector visible.

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12 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

A sculpture made of stacked chairs supporting a film projector. A pink t-shirt lines the top chair that the projector sits on, and runnings shoes support the bottom chair.

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Four running shoes supporting at its corners a stack of chairs.

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Two projections on a dark wall. The left projection, which is bigger than the right one, features a pink background with red outlined circle. The right projection features black vertical lines running from the bottom to top of the frame.

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15 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

A sculpture made of stacked chairs supporting a film projector in a dark room facing two projections on a dark wall.

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16 Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill 2023.jpg

M*****

For more than twenty years, Sesemiya (Tracy Williams) has been engaged with the revitalization of Coast Salish cultural practices. Through research, collaborative experimentation and consultation with Knowledge Keepers, Sesemiya’s work embodies her deep knowledge of Coast Salish lands. A fifth-generation cedar weaver, the objects she makes extend directly from her practice of gathering and preparing wild materials. 
 
Sesemiya presents at the Contemporary Art Gallery *s7ulh waḵáy̓stn iy ta stamsh cht* (Our Weapons and Warriors), a new body of work that sees the artist engaging the theme of land defence. Employing materials such as cedar slats and roots, fishskin leather, animal bones, and synthetic human skin, the exhibition alludes to the figure of a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh warrior in traditional accoutrement, armed with tools for battle. While the tools Sesemiya has recreated are anachronistic in nature, the project of cultural revitalization they result from is vitally urgent. *s7ulh waḵáy̓stn iy ta stamsh cht* proposes traditional ways of living, knowing, and being with the land to themselves be acts of resistance to the ongoing colonial occupation of unsurrendered Sḵwx̱wú7mesh lands, in the artist’s words, “inspiring the future generations of stelmexw to *tl’a7ashen ta nexwniẁ-chet* (celebrate our teachings that make us who we are).”

#### Biography
Sesemiya (Tracy Williams) is a knowledge seeker, dreamer, water protector, land defender, lover, mother, auntie, weaver, and cultural practitioner. Her rich relationships with plants, animals, land, and water have taken her to the tops of mountains, the bottom of the ocean, fields of fireweed, and occasionally art galleries. Her work has appeared in exhibitions such as *lineages and land bases*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); *Intangible: Memory and Innovation in Coast Salish Art*, Bill Reid Gallery (2017); and *N. Vancouver*, The Polygon Gallery (2017). In 2021, a commissioned work of Sesemiya’s was included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s presentation of Yoko Ono’s *Water Event*. Sesemiya is a proud member of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nation.


CAG - Sesemiya - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - Web.pdf

CAG - Sesemiya - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - Web.pdf

A carved stone wrapped with a rope displayed on a wooden surface.

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Stone Necklace.jpg

clothing, armour and weapons belonging to a Squamish warrior in a room with dark grey walls, with a white wall in the foreground with the artist's name and exhibition's title printed on it. 

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01 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

rear view of clothing, armour and weapons belonging to a Squamish warrior, suspended in mid-air and arranged to look like an exploded view diagram. a hide war robe is most prominent; an antler and stone club is also visible from the side.

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02 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

side view of clothing, armour and weapons belonging to a Squamish warrior, suspended in mid-air and arranged to look like an exploded view diagram. coiled cedar rope, war whoop and a knife in a sheath are visible from the side.

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03 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

frontal photo of clothing, armour and weapons belonging to a Squamish warrior, most prominently a headpiece made of cedar boughs, cedar breastplate, war apron, sneakers made from tanned hide, and arm and leg covers made fishskin leather

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04 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

a suspended envelope-shaped bag made of tanned leather suspended between the edges of a hide robe and cedar war apron and breastplate. the bag is fringed on its right and left edges and on the edge of the flap, and held closed by a small bone.

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05 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

a cedar breastplate with owl feathers and talons hanging from its front face, tanned hide leather straps, and a bear tooth necklace and beaver spine necklace suspended in front of it

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a pair of fishskin leather leg covers suspended behind the bottom of a cedar war apron. the knees of the leg covers feature a zig-zag patterned shape

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07 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

a pair of converse all-star-style sneakers made from tanned hide, suspended several inches above a concrete floor. the sneakers' soles resemble moccasins.

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08 Sesemiya 2023.jpg

the bottom half of a fishskin leather arm cover, arranged to look as if it's holding a wooden shaft. the hand of the arm cover bears a zig-zag patterned shape. fish scales are visible in the texture of arm cover throughout.

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s7ulh waḵáy̓stn iy ta stamsh cht

The work of Dionne Lee engages closely with photographic methodologies to pursue forms of knowledge counter to the imperialist assumptions that underlie the conventions of North American landscape photography. Central to Lee’s practice is the body’s experience of the world at a close distance, a scale that she privileges in her work as an access point for understanding the relationship between people and land.

In *Ratios*, displayed as a trio of photographs at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and a series of successively darkening photocopies on CAG’s façade, Lee mutually implicates small rocks and her own hand as tools to measure each other. Invoking the practice in geological survey photographs to include small objects in frame to indicate scale, these works stage by proxy the relationship between human bodies and land, and the asymmetry of their impacts on one another. 

*Dionne Lee: Ratios* is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — InTransit BC.

#### Biography
Dionne Lee is a visual artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and video. Her work explores power and personal history in relation to the American landscape, and interrogates historical narratives that exist within photographic representations of land and place. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Feria Material, Mexico City; New Orleans Museum of Art; Aperture Foundation, New York; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others. Lee was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Chinati Foundation and is a 2021–2023 Artist-in-Residence with Unseen California.

CAG - Dionne Lee - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - Web.pdf

CAG - Dionne Lee - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - Web.pdf

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Dionne Lee - Ratios (detail).jpg

CAG’s façade with Dionne Lee’s Ratios across eight street-facing windows. The artworks each depict a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints, and from left to right appear successively darker across the series.

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01 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring a pair of images depicting a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints. Both images are legible, with the right image slightly darker than the left one.

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02 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring a pair of images depicting a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints. Both images are darker than is optimum, with the right image darker than the left one.

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03 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring a pair of images depicting a hand with small white pebbles placed on its joints. Both images are significantly darker than is optimum, with the right image darker than the left one. The image is difficult to make out.

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04 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A pair of windows featuring what look like black smudges or shadows. The right image is slightly darker than the left one.

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05 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A frontal view of a SkyTrain station with two photos in its windows. The first photo depicts a rock with bits of white tape arranged in an oval around its perimeter. The second depicts the same rock with bits of white tape dotting its surface.

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06 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A frontal view of a SkyTrain station with one photo in its window. The photo depicts a rock on a blue tarp with a hand drawn on its surface and bits of white tape arranged in an oval around its perimeter. 

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07 Dionne Lee 2023.jpg

A diagonal view of a SkyTrain station with three photos in its windows. The photos each depict a rock on a blue tarp with bits of white tape arranged either in an oval around its perimeter or on its surface. A hand is drawn on one rock’s surface.

Opening Reception

RSVP

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