Faye HeavyShield's Calling Stones

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Faye HeavyShield, “Calling Stones (Conversations),” 2017

detail of installation at Art Gallery of Alberta (photo by M.N. Hutchinson)

Imagine a world where past and future seamlessly coexist: a world where not only our parents and grandparents, but an endless line of ancestors as well as future generations, are an ever-present part of our lives – not eerie or ghostly presences, but a caring, loving community that fills us with a sense belonging. This is the worldview embraced by Faye HeavyShield in Calling Stones (Conversations), on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton until Feb. 19.

HeavyShield, a Kainai-Blood artist, took inspiration for this exhibition from the southern Alberta landscape near her home in Stand Off, as well as the many trips her family took to the Majorville Medicine Wheel (Iniskim Umaapi). She documented these pilgrimages over many years, taking photos of her son, daughter and grandson; solitary figures silhouetted against this sacred site on a hill overlooking the Bow River east of Calgary. The site, in use for thousands of years, is a place where offerings of sage, sweetgrass, willow and tobacco are still made and where spiritual activities continue to link the past and the future.

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Faye HeavyShield, “Untitled,” 2016

digital photograph (image courtesy of the artist)

The four installations and single video that comprise HeavyShield’s show are as spare as the prairie landscape, and give the gallery a sense of contemplative silence. As viewers wander through nearly empty rooms, delicate installations composed of feather-light elements come into focus. For example, many voices one story; one voice many stories is an airy column composed of small paper figures – people walking, children playing in the grass or doing cartwheels. Suspended, they sway in air currents created as visitors move past. On the floor is a spot-lit circle covered with laser print transfers of prairie grass. Inattentive viewers could dismiss this work as technically simplistic, but they would be missing its intensity of feeling and conceptual richness.

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Faye HeavyShield, “Calling Stones (Conversations),” 2017

detail of installation at Art Gallery of Alberta (photo by M.N. Hutchinson)

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Faye HeavyShield, “Calling Stones (Conversations),” 2017

detail of installation at Art Gallery of Alberta (photo by M.N. Hutchinson)

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Faye HeavyShield, “Calling Stones (Conversations),” 2017

detail of installation at Art Gallery of Alberta (photo by M.N. Hutchinson)

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Faye HeavyShield, “Calling Stones (Conversations),” 2017

detail of installation at Art Gallery of Alberta (photo by M.N. Hutchinson)

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For someone like me, raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, this show offers a world that’s unfamiliar yet comforting. HeavyShield’s ancestral figures are animated, almost like snapshots of family members going about their daily activities. They hover above the hilltop that sets the stage: a sacred ground where past and future blur. This is a space where my rigid, perhaps illusory sense of linear time dissolves. In contrast to the individualistic and often lonely character of contemporary Western society, these works express a worldview that connects us all, those who came before, and those who are still to be born.

While there are distinctions between my worldview and the one this show movingly presents, there are shared archetypal themes. Light, space and a sense of transcendence are also communicated by cathedrals with spires that reach to the sky. Even a Christmas tree is an ancient symbol of the axis mundi: the connection between sky and earth. What makes this show so compelling is that it takes universal symbols and opens them – and us – to another system of perception. As German philosopher Martin Heidegger eloquently suggests, a temple, a medicine wheel or an artwork “opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force.”