Maria Hupfield
Maria Hupfield, Artist Tour Guide Label, 2013, inkjet digital print, 20.32 x 27.94 cm, courtesy of the artist.
Maria Hupfield, Present – Absence, 2013, outline for glass etching for the performance Present - Absence, commissioned by the SBC Gallery for the exhibition Stage Set Stage.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Maria Hupfield, performance at 6 p.m. followed by a conference with cheyanne turions and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre
Present – Absence, 2013
"Using live performance I reinterpret a selection of labels taken from four different exhibitions in Montreal (Beat Nation, Wearing Our Identity, Performance Lab, and Stage Set Stage), as scores to reintroduce the physical presence of the artist unified across various venues. The labels will be on display for the duration of the Gallery exhibit along with a frosted outline of me as artist on the gallery door. Additional residuals from the performance will remain post performance. This 15min performance presents the absent artists body in the gallery to adapt strategies of engagement and presence drawing parallels with the temporal paradox of living indians expected to play-dead and how by extension nations based on unresolved histories of domination and force effect us all fundamentally in the present. This work is titled after the term defined by Kate Shanley - "in that Native peoples are a permanent "present absence" in the U.S. colonial imagination, an "absence" that reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified."
- Maria Hupfield
Documentation
Recent performances related to Present - Absence
Performance lab at Galerie H ugues Charbonneau
Artist Tour Guide, National Museum of the American Indian NY
Based in Brooklyn New York Maria Hupfield (b. 1975) is Canadian First Nations, of Anishnaabe (Ojibway) heritage and a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. A MFA graduate of York University, she earned a BA Specialist in Art and Art History from the University of Toronto and Sheridan College. Her performance “Contain That Force: 7 Solo Acts” was presented by the National Gallery of Canada for the exhibition “Sakahan: International Indigenous Art”, at SAW Video and Media Arts, Ottawa Canada. She also performed “All is Moving” in response to the paintings of Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Accola Griefen Gallery, Chelsea NY and participated in A Conversation on Performance Art: Women Redrawing/Performance, organized by The Feminist Art Project at SOHO20 Chelsea NY. Maria was recently selected for the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the 2013 Winter Studio Residency Wave Hill NY, and the 2012 Artist Leadership Program, Smithsonian Washington DC. She has shown at the Museum of Art and Design New York, Vancouver Art Gallery, Toronto Power Plant, and 7a*11d International Performance Festival. This winter she will perform “An Artist Tour Guide” commissioned by the National Museum of the American Indian NY in response to the exhibition "Before and after the Horizon: Anishnaabe Artists of the Great Lakes”. Hupfield’s work was featured in the 2011 winter edition of Black Flash Magazine on performance photography and in the North Edition of Fuse Magazine winter for the collaborative artist project “From the Moon to the Belly” with Laakkuluk Williamson.
For recommended readings by Maria Hupfield, please consult the Research Station.