Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving

Name: Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving
Item: Southern Alberta Art Gallery
Author: Murray Whyte

by Murray Whyte

July 3, 2017

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Maria Hupfield, "The One Who Keeps on Giving," 2017

two single-channel video projections with sound, 15 min. loop, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal

Maria Hupfield has spent the last seven years in Brooklyn, a far cry – in every respect – from the decidedly less urban surroundings of Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, Ont., where she grew up. It was a calculated move – Hupfield was positioning herself at a critical distance from the rising tide of Indigenous contemporary art making in Canada, determined to find her own voice. So for her first major homecoming at the Power Plant in Toronto this winter, an exhibition now on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge until Sept. 10, some careful introspection about her roots was very much in order.

There, alongside her established sculptural practice of remaking everyday objects – a snowmobile helmet, a cassette tape player, boots, moccasins, a canoe – with industrial felt, an effort to neutralize loaded symbols and reduce them to simple, pliable form – Hupfield made a pair of videos. Called The One Who Keeps on Giving, they’re the same, but intensely different

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Maria Hupfield, "The One Who Keeps on Giving," 2017

two single-channel video projections with sound, 15 min. loop, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal

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Maria Hupfield, "The One Who Keeps on Giving," 2017

two single-channel video projections with sound, 15 min. loop, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal

In the gallery, they face off against each other, taking turns, one after the other. Both show Hupfield – impassive but peaceful – holding a small oil painting of turbulent blue waters. Around her is a procession of intense music and movement: Her brother and sister, both professional powwow dancers, perform the slow, deliberate steps of a ceremonial dance. Her sister, a powwow singer, gives voice to the unfolding scene.

The difference here is the setting. On one screen, it unfolds under a wash of warm light on the wooden stage of the Stockey Centre in Parry Sound during an Indigenous storytellers’ festival. On the other, the same performance, but on the cool concrete floors of the Power Plant itself, the performers active against a backdrop of stark white.

There are many ways to read this, and Hupfield is careful not to give away too much, but here’s my take: The painting, made by her late mother, is a totemic object, particularly on ancestral land. Hupfield – and her generation – are embracing a culture that, for her mother and her peers, was all but erased by the brutalities of federal policies, including the forced assimilation of residential schools. They are honouring a mother’s presence, her survival, her resilience and her optimism in bringing children into the world with the hope they might know a heritage that had been legally denied her. The fact that the painting is an unpeopled landscape – a polite colonial convention that excludes humanity itself – seems not a coincidence.

In Parry Sound, the family wraps their performance in an emotional huddle, tears streaming, the painting clasped tightly to Hupfield’s breast. A rising chorus of applause can be heard, though no audience is visible. This is no art video shoot, but an act of communion, performed for a people who, for generations, could rely only on each other to keep their community intact. The back of the canvas is all that is shown; Hupfield holds its thick blue brushstrokes close.

Maria Hupfield, "Performance Lab: Lethbridge," 2017

performance in collaboration with Cindy Baker, Tanya Doody and Mandy Espezel, photo by Rod Leland

In the gallery, there are no tears. The performance is precise, measured, quietly defiant, with only the camera – no audience – bearing witness. “Toronto didn’t get a performance,” Hupfield told me, forthright, the only time her natural openness and warmth shifted ever so slightly to curtness. After having so much taken from them, I thought, it seemed only right that something be withheld. A critical piece of the defiance was the painting, kept from view in Parry Sound, on full display in the Power Plant video (for the exhibition, it also hung on one vast wall, all on its own.) Placing her mother’s work on display in an art museum, the likes of which is a thoroughly colonial construct, seemed to make the act all the more subversive.

Hupfield elides such checks and balances when talking about her work, as she must, choosing instead to keep it open to a breadth of readings. (My suggestion of broken generational continuity and the work as a gesture of resistance, to connect one to the next, was met with a gentle deflection. Hupfield simply said she was more interested in “getting past those hierarchies and opening it up for different kinds of conversations.”)

If she’s non-committal in conversation, she’s anything but in her work. At the centre of each performance, the dancers play off her emotional state – she is the touchstone, the eye of the storm, impossible not to watch amid the tumult, her slightest movements and expressions guiding the tenor of the piece moment by moment.

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Maria Hupfield, “The One Who Keeps on Giving,” 2017

installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, photo by Rod Leland

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Maria Hupfield, "The One Who Keeps on Giving," 2017

installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, photo by Rod Leland

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Maria Hupfield, "The One Who Keeps on Giving," 2017

installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, photo by Rod Leland

As tears well in the Parry Sound piece, I was reminded of Hupfield’s performance at Montreal’s McCord Museum, where she acted as a tour guide through its First Peoples collection. She instructed the group to join hands as they assembled into an impromptu round dance, and then blew a whistle, upon which museum staff opened a glass case of historic Indigenous objects, which she replaced with objects from her shoulder bag. (Also worth noting: At the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Hupfield collaborated with three local artists – Cindy Baker, Tanya Doody and Mandy Espezel – in an opening performance that included ropes, knives plunged into clay, and a pile of salt that was carried from one place to another, a series of ambiguous but compelling actions developed on site to explore connections to place and community.)

If it’s not apparent how these might be the same, consider what is: An audience, people, an exchange, communion. Hupfield’s practice lies less in the inequities of Indigenous identity in the 21st century – though it is about that – than in the more critical experience of human connection. Without that, how much progress can be made? The One Who Keeps On Giving – generous, humane and warm on the one hand, stolidly defiant and detached on the other – tells you all you need to know.