Amy Malbeuf: tensions

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Photo by Jordan Bennett.

Amy Malbeuf, "across the land," 2018

buffalo hide, wood, snow fence.

Concluding in Brandon after a nation-wide tour, the Main Gallery will feature, tensions, by Métis visual artist Amy Malbeuf. The AGSM Billboard will also feature a new work by Malbeuf, entitled à la façon du pays (in the custom of the country), which is the fourth and final project in the Billboard series. The Community Gallery showcases the exhibition, Healing Through Arts and Culture, and brings together works by artists in the Brandon area.

Thursday’s opening reception is free to attend and will feature singers and drummers from the Sweet Medicine Singers collective. There will also be a free “Lunch and Look” tour on Friday, March 1st at 12 noon. Guest speaker, Cathy Mattes, Professor in the Visual and Aboriginal Art department at Brandon University, will walk visitors through the Main Gallery.

Amy Malbeuf is a Métis artist from Rich Lake, Alberta. Through utilizing mediums such as caribou hair tufting, beadwork, installation, performance, and video, Malbeuf explores notions of identity, place, language, and ecology. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in over forty shows as well as participated in many international artist residencies Malbeuf has been the recipient of such honours as the 2016 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, the 2016 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in Canada from the Hnatyshyn Foundation, a 2017 REVEAL award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation, and was long listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award.

tensions is an exhibition of tarps, bison hide, caribou hair, rabbit fur, beading, bear grease, inheritance, and quiet resistance. Embracing a deeply personal connection to materials and process, Malbeuf presents a nuanced portrait of Métis familial ties. Overall, her work creates a sense of identity in suspension between objects and frameworks, care and protest, subject and context, shame and pride, history and future, as well as subtle portraits in how we navigate the objects, traditions, knowledge, legacies, and relationships that we inherit, and places them in material conversation with land, animal, gesture, and kinship.