Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, "Cousin," 2019
pantyhose, tobacco, thistle, spider charm, dandelion and thread, 6 × 4 × 7″ Private Collection, Vancouver (courtesy of the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver, and Cooper Cole, Toronto © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill)
Vancouver-based Métis artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is showing her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
Her exhibition, on view in the museum’s street-level space from April 25 to Aug.15, features multiple works using tobacco as a key material, alluding to the plant’s complex Indigenous and colonial histories.
The exhibition features sculptures and drawings, including several new works, constructed primarily from tobacco, along with other sourced and found materials from her Vancouver neighbourhood.
Projects: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is organized by Lucy Gallun, associate curator in the museum's photography department.
Prior to colonization, tobacco was one of the most widely traded materials in the Americas. It later became the first currency in the colonies of North America when English settlers established a system in which promissory notes representing amounts of tobacco – “Tobacco Notes” – could be used to purchase goods and carry out other financial transactions.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, "Dispersal," 2019
Virginia tobacco, Perique tobacco, thread, seed pods, support stocking, and found pole, 43 × 14.3″ (courtesy the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver, and Cooper Cole, Toronto © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill)
“The Indigenous economic life of tobacco continues, despite colonialism, criminalization and the imposition of capitalism,” Hill says. “It’s evidence that our economic systems survive and continue to offer an alternative.”
Sculptures stuffed with ground tobacco – the largest approximates the size of the artist’s body – occupy central tables. Some of these rabbits and hybrid human figures stand, while others recline.
The exhibition also includes five flags that borrow their proportions from the dimensions of the American dollar bill. Three are sewn from disintegrating tobacco leaves. The other two are constructed from paper coated in homemade tobacco-infused cooking oil to which Hill has applied pigments that must dry over several months, before additional materials are sewn or glued to the surface.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, "Spell #9, sunrise on clark," 2019
tobacco-infused Crisco oil, oil paint, wildflowers, tobacco flowers, magazine cutout, spider charm, and thread on paper, 13 × 9.75″ Private collection (courtesy the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver, and Cooper Cole, Toronto © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill)
Hill's Spells, made through the same process as her tobacco-oil-soaked flags, are small richly coloured drawings adorned with charms, wildflowers, beer tabs and other ephemera. They represent the power of reciprocity, interdependence and dispersal, attributes central to a gift economy.
"Hill’s use of tobacco as material at once critiques settler colonial economic systems and celebrates the Indigenous history of the gift economy, in which tobacco remains a key component," the museum says.
Hill, born in 1979 in Comox on Vancouver Island, is co-editor of the 2015 anthology The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts and a BFA and BA from Simon Fraser University in Metro Vancouver.
Source: Museum of Modern Art
