Maria Hupfield: Rupture
Sally Frater
Featuring works that span performance, video, sculpture, and textiles, Rupture provides a window into the transdisciplinary practice of artist Maria Hupfield. Informed by Anishinaabe cultural knowledge, Hupfield connects performance art and object-making with both Indigenous and feminist narratives. Bringing common, everyday materials into the gallery, her work speaks to a tradition of DIY and anti-aesthetic methods, challenging our expectations of how these materials operate in our contemporary moment while connecting them to wider histories unfolding within the Americas. Non-hierarchical and dynamic, the installation explores ideas of mobility and experimentation, activating place, lived experience, and cultural practices in order to centre the work of resistance. Highlighting pieces that engender multiple forms of engagement and reflection, all work in tandem to remind us that the body is the first site of truth in the story of decolonization.
Image detail: Maria Hupfield, KA-POW!, 2017, cedar and paint, 12 x 10.5 x 10 ft.
Organized by the Art Gallery of Guelph with the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
About the artist
Maria Hupfield
Awarded the 2018 Hnatyshyn Foundation prize for outstanding achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist, Maria Hupfield’s first major solo exhibition, The One Who Keeps on Giving, was produced and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Her work has also been presented at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and was featured at SITE Santa Fe (2016), as well as within Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14). Recent performances include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Brooklyn Museum. Her upcoming solo project, Nine Years Towards The Sun, opened at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, on December 6, 2019. Together with Jason Lujan, she co-owns Native Art Department International and was recently appointed Professor of Indigenous Media Arts + Performance, with a Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto. Based in Toronto, Hupfield is Anishinaabe and an off-rez citizen of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario.
View More Exhibitions
exhibition
September 21.2023 / December 30.2023
This group exhibition that explores various rituals related to the everyday and the natural environment through art by those who hold cultural ties to the Caribbean.
exhibition
September 14.2023 / December 17.2023
Seeing the Land, Feeling the Sea presents landscapes by Canadian artist Takao Tanabe from AGG’s permanent collection.
exhibition
September 14.2023 / December 17.2023
This exhibition of works by Manitoulin Island-based artist Carl Beam probes the interstices of history, politics, science, materiality, and Indigeneity.
exhibition
September 14.2023 / December 17.2023
The Third Scenario examines the act of art making through hyphenated conditions and what it means to create while being Asian and living in Canada.
exhibition
July 14.2023 / September 3.2023
This exhibition highlights Grande’s distinct visual lexicon culled from her experiences as well as cultural sources – symbolic references that coalesce in surreal, painterly compositions.
exhibition
May 25.2023 / September 10.2023
Incorporating elements of local lore as well as the evolving built landscape, Norlen’s large-scale drawings explore the effects of time and the play of memory and imagination that results.
exhibition
May 19.2023 / September 3.2023
The constructions of José Luis Torres evoke the prolonged ambiguity and estrangement inherent in experiences of immigration and exile.
exhibition
May 19.2023 / July 9.2023
Chelsea Ryan combines diaristic practices with digital technologies to record the still, transient, and enduring moments she notices of everyday life.