Faye HeavyShield

Join exhibiting artists Charlene Vickers and Faye HeavyShield for an in-depth discussion about their respective practices and the concerns that drive them in a conversation moderated by artist, curator and writer Lorna Brown.

### Biographies

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She is the recipient of the 2018 VIVA Award. Recent exhibitions include a co-presentation with Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun *Lets’lo:tseltun*, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art (2021); *Rain Shadow*, Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021); *Where Do We Go From Here?*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); *Biennale nationale de sculpture Contemporaine*, Quebec (2020); *An Assembly of Shapes*, Oakville Galleries (2018); *Speaking with Hands and Territories*, SFU Galleries (2018); and *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). International group exhibitions include *the map is not the territory*, Portland Art Museum (2019); *Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art*, MoCNA, Santa Fe (2017); *From The Belly of The Beast*, Grace Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); and *If We Never Met*, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and Simon Fraser University (Critical Studies of the Arts, 1998; MFA, 2013).

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy from the Kainai (Blood) Nation in the foothills of Southern Alberta. She is a fluent speaker of the Blackfoot language and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. HeavyShield has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, including *Nations in Urban Landscapes*, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; *rock paper river*, Gallery Connexion, Fredericton; *Into the Garden of Angels*, The Power Plant, Toronto; and *blood*, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. Her work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg; the Heard Museum, Phoenix; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.

Lorna Brown is Acting Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and a visual artist, writer, educator and editor, exhibiting her work internationally since 1984. Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. Brown received an honorary degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2015), the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.



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Charlene Vickers & Faye HeavyShield with Lorna Brown

In Conversation

In a career spanning more than thirty years, artist Faye HeavyShield has developed a practice of profound influence, renowned as readily for its poetic use of form and material as its evocative embodiments of memory, community and place. A powerfully concise aesthetic vocabulary gives shape to HeavyShield’s work, one rooted in the topography and texture of her homeland in the foothills of Southern Alberta and her upbringing in the Kainai community. Whether drawing on the winds, grasses and rivers of the Northern Plains; staging scenes redolent of gathering or exchange; or exploring elemental geometries that signal continuities and connections, the objects, images and installations of HeavyShield’s work manifest as extensions of land, language and body. 

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, HeavyShield presents a pair of new works in sculpture and drawing, each a meditation on lineage and line. An unbound sculpture, ropelike in form, anchors the exhibition, accompanied by a series of gestural drawings that recall the shape of a memory. Bearing the hallmarks of HeavyShield’s practice—repetition, distillation and material humility—these works extend the artist’s career-long reflections on continuance, on that which connects and sustains.


### Biography

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy from the Kainai (Blood) Nation in the foothills of Southern Alberta. She is a fluent speaker of the Blackfoot language and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. HeavyShield has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, including *Nations in Urban Landscapes*, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; *rock paper river*, Gallery Connexion, Fredericton; *Into the Garden of Angels*, The Power Plant, Toronto; and *blood*, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. Her work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg; the Heard Museum, Phoenix; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.

ProgramGuideFall2021.pdf

ExhibitionGuideFayeHeavyShield.pdf

This is a close-up view of Faye HeavyShield’s beaded sculpture. It is a long unbounded string made of small red beads woven together. The smooth surface of each bead is reflecting the gallery light.

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A series of drawings and a ropelike sculpture are installed in a gallery space. The sculpture is placed on a large plinth. It is a red beaded cord forming a continuous line, maplike in shape.

thumbnail_01-FayeHeavyShield-2021.jpg

01-FayeHeavyShield-2021.jpg

A ropelike sculpture is installed in a gallery space. The sculpture is placed on a large plinth. It is a red beaded cord forming a continuous line, maplike in shape.

thumbnail_02-FayeHeavyShield-2021.jpg

02-FayeHeavyShield-2021.jpg

This is a close-up view of Faye HeavyShield’s beaded sculpture. It is a long unbound cord, which has been covered entirely in red beads. The surface of each bead reflects the gallery light.

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This is an installation shot of Faye HeavyShield’s drawings. Dozens of unframed drawings of various sizes and papers depict silhouettes of heads. They are hung closely to one another on a gallery wall.

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This is a close-up view of Faye HeavyShield’s drawings installed on a gallery wall. They were drawn with several different mediums, including markers and pens. They depict the shapes of human heads.

Faye HeavyShield

Exhibitions

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