Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet | you’ll always know

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Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet, "Bury (detail)," 2020

acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Photo courtesy of Anica Neiman.

Opening Reception: Friday, October 14, 2022 at 7 pm

When my brother and I were little, we found a squirrel that had fallen and passed on in a bed of soft, uncut grass. The two of us cradled it and brought it inside the farmhouse, not sure what to do. Well intentioned, we laid it on our moshom’s placemat next to his coffee mug. Mom laughed warmly and said he may mistake it for a biscuit. She swaddled the squirrel and led us back outside where we buried it between lilac bushes, laying down medicine and saying a prayer.

I like to imagine this is where my mom and her siblings used to bury the little flies they collected from window ledges in the farm house, tucked neatly into tissue box resting places and walked out by funeral march to where the lilacs meet the birch trees.

you’ll always know is a series of careful acknowledgements recollecting memories shared between relatives on the land they grew from. It nods to place markers left between generations; where they played, grieved, gathered, where they kept fires, and parted ways between visits. Deeply based in Kiona’s own memories, the stories painted in these works weave between what is her’s, shared and witnessed, while leaving alone what feels private to her family.

The backdrop of her paintings stretch across the land scrip her moshom received after the enfranchisement of Michel First Nation. Kiona looks to multigenerational histories to contextualize the way she knows her home; her moshom was born up the hill from this land on what used to be the Michel reserve, and her mom, aunties, and uncles were born on land scrip, where Kiona would also grow up for a time. This became home to many relatives’ through their childhoods, and a soft landing to return to as they grew. It saw many farm dogs, cold Winters, hot Summers, and lilac blooms in the Spring. These paintings are a way for Kiona to honor those memories, knowing that she’ll never be alone in their inside jokes, and in the markers that make up the stories shared.