Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

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Join us for a public conversation between the summer 2023 exhibiting artists, moderated by Lorna Brown.

### RSVP
Registration for this event is required. Secure your place [here](https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/talk-gabrielle-lhirondelle-hill-dionne-lee-sesemiya-with-lorna-brown-tickets-636858449767).

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### Biographies
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.

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.

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.

Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor. Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and is an ongoing member of the Other Sights Producer team. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Acting Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, curating exhibition series such as *Beginning With the Seventies* that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism. Brown has exhibited her work internationally since 1984, and has taught at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she received an honorary doctorate of letters in 2015. Awards include 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 Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.

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In Conversation - Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Dionne Lee and Sesemiya with Lorna Brown.jpg

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Dionne Lee & Sesemiya with Lorna Brown

In Conversation

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

We’re delighted to announce the second installment of CAG Reads, a book club where artists invite us to read alongside them. Each month an artist proposes a book for our collective reading pleasure, culminating in a virtual hangout where the artist leads a wide-ranging discussion grounded in their chosen reading material.

For our June installment, we’re pleased to welcome Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, a Metis artist and writer who lives and works on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Her work has shown at Unit 17, Polygon Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in Vancouver; the Alberta Art Gallery in Edmonton; SBC galerie d’art contemporain in Montreal; and STRIDE Gallery in Calgary. Hill 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.

For this month’s CAG Reads, L’Hirondelle Hill has selected a suite of short texts: *Tony’s Story* (1981) by  Leslie Marmon Silko, *Against the Police* (2007) by Miguel James (translated by Guillermo Parra) and *The Author of the Acacia Seeds* (1982) by Ursula k. Le Guin. Each of these texts explore rebellion, refusal and opposition—to the state, in art and otherwise.

### Getting the books

Please follow these links to read [*Against the Police*](http://www.typomag.com/issue18/james.html), [*Tony’s Story*](https://ndla.no/en/subjects/subject:39/topic:1:188693/topic:1:188701/resource:1:20439) and [*The Author of the Acacia Seeds*](https://xenoflesh.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ursula-k.-le-guin.pdf) for free online.

For readers interested in picking up Leslie Marmon Silko’s *Storyteller* (1981) or Ursula Le Guin’s *The Compass Rose* (1982), both [Massy Books](https://www.massybooks.com/reopening/) and [Pulp Fiction](http://pulpfictionbooksvancouver.com/) are continuing to receive orders and offer pick up services. Massy Books is generously offering a 20% discount for all CAG Reads participants ordering Storyteller. We also encourage participants to explore the eBook and audiobook catalogues available through their local libraries.


A portrait photograph of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill standing in front of a bush. Hill is wearing a red shirt and purple bottoms. 

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GH2018 headshot 1.jpg

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill presents Leslie Marmon Silko, Miguel James and Ursula K. Le Guin

CAG Reads

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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Paper cutouts and a strawberries hang from thin metal wires.

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Paper cutouts and a strawberry hang from thin metal wires.

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

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

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

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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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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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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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M*****

Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill
*Carry Down*, 2024
inkjet print, blackberry ink
24 x 17.5 inches (image)
Edition of 10 + 2 AP (signed; hand-painted)
Unframed

Following her summer 2023 exhibition at CAG, *M******, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill has produced for the gallery a hand-painted, limited edition work from one of the collaged drawings central to her show. Building on her long-term inquiry into structures of kinship, the idiosyncratic materials Hill harnesses in *M****** evoke processes of transmission: hair that holds the DNA of family members; natural pigments that speak to intergenerational teaching and exchange; web-like forms redolent of branching familial connections. A sense of circularity recurs throughout this work, giving form to Hill’s expansive reflections on parenting as an experience that moves one both forward and backward across time: toward the knowledges, injuries, kinships, and care structures that shaped one’s forebears, while simultaneously telegraphing one toward future generations.

Courtesy of the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Exhibitions

Talks & Events