Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, geetha thurairajah | We Work to Pay the Bills

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes & geetha thurairajah, "We Work to Pay the Bills"

installation view. Courtesy of the Gallery.

We Work to Pay the Bills brings together works by gallery artists Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes & geetha thurairajah. The exhibition presents recent sculpture, photography & painting produced between 2014 & 2020. The exhibition is titled after thurairajah’s 2019 painting We Work to Pay Bills, viewable online throughout the duration of the exhibition through PV, after Francis Picabia’s Le Salaire est la raison du travail (Salary Is the Reason for Work) from 1949.

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (b. 1979) is a Métis artist and writer. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Often, her projects emerge from an interest in capitalism as an imposed, impermanent, and vulnerable system, as well as in alternative economic modes. Her works have used found and readily-sourced materials to address concepts such as private property, exchange, and black-market economies. Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective seeking to decentre Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art, prioritizing instead land-based teachings and Indigenous epistemologies.

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Hill received her MFA from the California College of the Arts, and a BFA and BA from Simon Fraser University. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at the the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon (2020); Stride, Calgary (2019); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019/2022); Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby (2019); Gallery TPW, Toronto (2018); Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2018); SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montreal with the Woodland School (2017) and Gallery 44, Toronto (2016). Her writing has been published in many places, most recently in Beginning With the Seventies (Helen Belkin, UBC, 2019). She was also the co-editor of The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (ARP 2009) and Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (Wildred Laurier 2017). Hill lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

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Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (b. 1991) is a Hong Kong-born artist based in “Vancouver, Canada.” Her practice involves sourcing and scanning photographs and found objects to create painterly compositions with clear photographic subjects. Her work is currently on view at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) as part of the New Generation Photography exhibition. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include My Owns, Project Native Informant, London (2021); Everything Leaks, Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2020); Open Heart Run Off, Sibling, Toronto (2019); Keep Your Eyes On Your Prizes, Calaboose, Montreal and ddmmyyy, Artspeak, Vancouver (both 2018). Select group exhibitions have been held at the Royal Academy Antwerp, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Access Gallery & Centre A, Vancouver (all 2017). Holmes graduated from ECUAD with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography & a Curatorial minor in 2017.

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geetha thurairajah (b. 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice relies on allegory gleaned from art history, personal narrative and observations of modern life to recreate spaces that defy hierarchies of genre. thurairajah studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Wilfrid Laurier University and Bard College. Recent exhibitions include At Land, Foxy Production, New York City (2022); Suspended Disbelief, Arsenal Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); Soothsay, Unit 17, Vancouver (2020); Migration is more momentous than ancient invasions, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; No body to talk to, Invisible Exports, New York; Downward Flower, Fourteen30, Portland (all 2019); An Assembly of Shapes, Oakville Galleries (2018); Mingling with flowers panthers’ eyes, The New Gallery, Calgary and Here’s Looking at You, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (both 2017).