Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill in Galleries West

July 29, 2022

Venice Biennale: Can magical thinking help us imagine new ways through troubled times?

By Yani Kong

In The Milk of Dreams, a beautifully illustrated book made by the late British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington for her sons, the day-to-day world constantly transforms through the prism of magical thinking. This year’s Venice Biennale, which takes Carrington’s book as its theme, taps into the artist’s surrealist approach to access unconscious experiences. The biennale’s main exhibition walks a precarious balance between the unsettled urgency of our times and a total surrender to the world of dreams, magic and the uncanny. A similar tension is found in the romantic city of Venice, which is sinking at a pace set by climate change. Many works on view are difficult reminders that nothing – from our fantasies to our dream life and bodily experiences, the sources of so much extraverbal language – can escape the deep wounds of politics, economics, warfare and environmental calamity.

Rather than an escapist mode, imagination becomes a tactic to access potential in crisis, to uncover fresh or renewed human and non-human harmonies, and to reflect upon our responsibilities to planetary bodies. The exhibition’s thematic areas explore the relationship between the body and other individuals, the body and technology, and the body and the Earth, while also considering the changing definition of the human. It’s significant that Cecilia Alemani, this year’s curator, highlights the work of women, femme-identifying and non-binary practitioners among the exhibition’s 213 artists, centring a critical perspective otherwise relegated to the margins of history. In a multiverse model, Alemani proposes a wormhole towards disregarded genealogies that, nevertheless, are ongoing. She offers an encounter with strategies of worldbuilding and explorations of new or newly discovered synergies between forms.

[…]

I was especially excited to see Vancouver-based Métis artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s 2021 work Counterblaste, shown along with a small grouping of assemblages the artist calls “spells.” Her work, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art last year, incorporates tobacco, whether mixed into Crisco and other materials and set in collages or stuffed into pantyhose to create a many-teated rabbit woman. I thought of Aruna D’Souza’s Galleries West review of the New York show, which connects the casual act of bumming a smoke to a strained but enduring gift economy between Indigenous peoples and European colonizers. Counterblaste is languid and voluptuous. Her unhurried lusciousness gives a cheeky finger to rigid Eurocentric economics, “as if one token of value,” D’Souza writes, “is objectively more valuable than another.”

[…]

There have been a few important critiques about the biennale’s nationalist model. Most recently, Toronto arts writer Jayne Wilkinson rightly observes in Momus that national pavilions may no longer serve the people in those countries. Several pavilions this year critique the sponsorship of their nation-states, including the Nordic pavilion, which ceded its space to Sami artists, and the Polish pavilion, which was given to a Roma artist. I hope these historic acts will push more countries to relinquish representation to the Indigenous nations that host them.

To this end, it’s difficult to write a review of Canadians at the biennale when it’s clear that much of the work is being made in diaspora or is clearly informed by the contested territories where it is made. But Alemani’s magic-infused theme allows the conjuring of imaginary spaces that dwell more deeply on bodies in relation, which, perhaps, will help erode persistent binaries and divisions, creating room to explore alternatives.

To view the full article visit Galleries West

For more information about Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement	1 year	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Advertisement".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	1 year	This cookies is set by GDPR Cookie Consent WordPress Plugin. The cookie is used to remember the user consent for the cookies under the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	1 year	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	1 year	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".

Cookie	Duration	Description
_ga	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assign a randomly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid	1 day	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the wbsite is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages viisted in an anonymous form.

Cookie	Duration	Description
IDE	1 year 24 days	Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
test_cookie	15 minutes	This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the user's browser supports cookies.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	5 months 27 days	This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.

Cookie	Duration	Description
CONSENT	16 years 9 months 23 days 2 hours	No description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	1 year	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	1 year	No description
_gat_gtag_UA_135534658_1	1 minute	No description