Faye HeavyShield

Each season, CAG releases a series of Video Visits that offer short takes on our exhibitions. Presented in five languages — Cantonese, English, French, Mandarin and Spanish — these videos present a variety of perspectives on the work of Charlene Vickers and Faye HeavyShield.
 
### English Video Visits
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/644052137)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642458358)
 
### Visites vidéo en français
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/642461676)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642459013)
 
### Visitas de video en español
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/642461676)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642460285)
 
### 普通话视频之旅
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/644053000)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642459702)
 
### 粵語視頻參觀
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/644051423)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642460926)
 


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Fall 2021

Video Visits

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.



Three black and white portrait photographs are placed side by side. From the left to the right, the photographs are of Charlene Vickers, Faye HeavyShield, and Lorna Brown. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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New Work

The exhibit organizers and artists honour the legitimacy of hybrid aboriginal communities in Vancouver and other urban landscapes, and the importance of the histories of aboriginal peoples displaced from traditional lands. At the same time we acknowledge what is now called Vancouver as the territories of the Coast Salish Nation: Tsleil-Waututh (Burrard), Musqueam, Squamish.

The title of this exhibit, *Nations in Urban Landscapes* represents a strategy to metaphorically locate First Nations outside of the demarcated space of Indian reserves, traditional territories and the "Indian" land question — that is, outside the space where aboriginal people are "officially" recognized as having authority and expertise. Within this political terrain of First Nations/ Canadian relations, the conventions of authenticity, origins and tradition have emerged as a measuring stick for "Indianness." In contrast, the work of Faye HeavyShield, Shelly Niro and Eric Robertson reflect stratified and discontinuous histories, historical displacement, breaks in familial lineage, the impossibility of transcendent traditions, and the blurred edges of their legally, socially and politically defined aboriginal identities. All three artists undermine current "romantic" notions of the authentic Indian as a steward of the land or the official keeper of culture and spirituality, revealing instead the hybrid nature of contemporary aboriginal life. This exhibit, then, is not about how artists of aboriginal ancestry straddle the constructed monoliths of Western and aboriginal cultures. Rather, it speaks to the way in which these individual artists constantly negotiate the shifting boundaries of their aboriginal communities.

Faye HeavyShield currently works in Calgary and is a member of the Kainai of the Blackfoot Nation.

Shelley Niro lives and works and lives in Brantford and is a Bay of Quinte Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve.

Eric Robertson was born and raised in Vancouver and is of Euro-Canadian and Gitxsan heritage. He lives and works in Montreal, and is currently under contract as a Fine Arts instructor at the En'owkin Centre in the Okanagan Territory.

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche writer who lives in Washington, D.C. He was born in west Texas and has lived in Oklahoma, Maryland, South Dakota, San Francisco and New York. His book "Like a Hurricane," coauthored with Robert Allen. 

Marcia Crosby is a 3rd generation "urban Indian" of Haida and Tsimshian ancestry. She lives and works in Vancouver and Massett, Haida Gwaii as an art historian and curator, and a researcher and negotiator for aboriginal education in public institutions.

This exhibition and symposium have been made possible with support from the Canadian Native Arts Foundation and VanCity Credit Union.

Guest curated by Marcia Crosby


Essay: “Nations in Urban Landscape," Marcia Crosby

A close-up photo of a shell sculpture mounted on a white gallery wall. On the black surface of the round-shaped shell, the word ANCESTRAL is curved to show the mother-of-pearl inside.

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Two artworks mounted on a gallery wall. The one on the left contains 12 coloured photographs of landscapes and women. The other contains 24 black and white photographs of a woman from various angles.

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An installation view of the gallery shows photograph pieces mounted on a wall. Some of these photographs have a narrow-wide shape, in which blue wavy shapes are depicted in a dark background.

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A close-up photo of the artwork mounted on a gallery wall. Two rows of six colored photographs are closely lined up horizontally. Some photographs capture turtles, women, landscape, and orange leaves. 

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A close-up photo of the artwork mounted on a gallery wall. Two rows of six colored photographs are closely lined up horizontally. Some photographs capture people’s faces, plaques, and road signs.  

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Faye Heavyshield, Shelley Niro, Eric Roberson

Nations in Urban Landscapes

This publication was produced in 1995 by the Contemporary Art Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition *Nations in Urban Landscapes* at the Contemporary Art Gallery, October 28 – December 9, 1995, and at Oboro, Montreal in 1994. It includes texts by Marcia Crosby “Nations in Urban Landscapes” and “Lines, Lineage and Lies, or Borders, Boundaries and Bullshit” and Paul Chaat Smith “From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” and includes a preface by Keith Wallace.

Faye HeavyShield

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