Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, “Site Parasite Dice Paradise,” 2023

disassembled umbrellas, paper cut-outs, strawberries, spider cocoons, wire, tape and thread, detail of installation (courtesy Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; photo Rachel Topham Photography)

Threads of kinship are both woven and unpacked in Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s solo exhibition, M*****, on view until July 3 at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Here, familial strands are sometimes drawn as literal lines in wire and ink, but most typically take the form of hair, which the artist has animated and collaged to reflect on reproduction and motherhood. 

Hill, a Cree and Métis artist who lives in Vancouver, is one of five artists on this year’s short list for the Sobey Art Award. In recent years, she has participated in major international shows, notably a 2021 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, becoming – shockingly – the first Indigenous artist ever to have a solo show there, as well as the 2022 Venice Biennale’s primary group exhibition, The Milk of Dreams. Her work at these venues used tobacco as a central material that took many forms, including a multi-teated bunny, exploring ways the plant is linked to histories and cultures of exchange. 

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, “M*****,” 2023

exhibition view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (courtesy CAG, photo by Rachel Topham Photography)

Hill’s work in M***** asserts that motherhood, family structures and parenting contribute to dense economies of production. Her argument is not aggressive but rather is transmitted through cheeky gestures using unruly and offbeat materials. Her examination of parenting is humorous and disorienting, with moments of beauty, just like the experience itself.  

The gallery basks in the aroma of strawberries, which are slowly fermenting as they hang from Site Parasite Dice Paradise, a large mobile constructed from disassembled umbrellas. The berries are suspended among spider cocoons and small paper cut-outs of cosmic-looking holes and patterns. 

Behind this, another multi-limbed mobile, Octom**, is festooned with cut-out images of Nadya “Octomom” Suleman – the media pariah attacked as selfish, over-sexed and neglectful after she gave birth to octuplets in 2009 – and images of parasites, tentacles and insect eggs. Here, Hill allows the glorified ripeness of motherhood to unspool with true-to-life fleshiness and intense cultural judgment.

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, “M*****,” 2023

installation view at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (courtesy CAG, photo by Rachel Topham Photography)

An adjacent gallery hosts the exhibition’s eponymous installation. Part sculpture and part moving image, it consists of two sets of stackable chairs dressed in T-shirts and sneakers pulled from the closets of the artist and her mother. Resting on the forms’ bellies are two 16mm projectors looping deadstock film to which Hill has added collaged materials.

On the first projector, hand-dyed silk dipped in blackberry ink is fixed to clear film leader. As it rolls, deep stains and small holes burned into the material swell and shrink on the wall. Meanwhile, a smaller projection unwinds hair Hill collected from family members and affixed to blank film leader with clear nail polish. At times, a single hair stretches for a few seconds, while at others multi-coloured strands loosen and untangle. 

There is something so pleasing about the analogue clicking and clacking of the projectors. The beauty of the blending colours and lines are mesmerizing. It’s almost possible to forget what it is that you are looking at: undulating spore-like projections and all that shed hair. 

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, “Echo Body,” 2023 (courtesy Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; photo by Rachel Topham Photography)

Hill speaks to the unbounded quality of parenting, as well as its viscous and visceral realities. But instead of expressing exhaustion – as all these fluids, smells and body parts might suggest – the show’s final component, a suite of four collaged drawings, including one Hill made with her daughter after they spent the day picking berries together, proposes the possibility of new knowledge. 

Each piece maps objects on tissue smeared with blackberry ink. In one, hair is fixed in concentric circles, while paper cut-outs and burnt holes form place markers on others, each tracing the ragged lines of parenting. These marks swish and swirl, blend and ferment with the sweetness of sharing one’s space, time and body so intimately with another. ■

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill: M***** at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver from May 26 to Sept. 3, 2023.

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