Lauren Crazybull | Wish you were here

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Lauren Crazybull, “July 19, 2025,” 2025

(courtesy of the Gallery)

What is at stake when sacred Indigenous sites are commodified and commercialized within a tourism-based economy? What would it mean to access these sites today – both as Indigenous people and settlers – and to bear witness to the history of these lands?

Lauren Crazybull: Wish you were here reflects on our relationship to the ancestral lands that we inhabit, looking at the ways in which these familial and ancient places are transformed into heritage tourism sites that are both an extension and a reflection of the slow violence that is etched into their core.

In the summer of 2024, Crazybull visited a number of sacred sites on Blackfoot territory, including the Majorville Medicine Wheel and the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage site. Though far from being a tourist herself, Crazybull questions what it means to feel – or be treated – like a tourist on the land that her ancestors lived on for millennia. Subverting touristic tropes encountered on her trip – such as information signs, directional signage, and postcard imagery – the works in this exhibition ask us to rethink our relationship to these ancient sites, and to think of all of Blackfoot territory, including the land on which Contemporary Calgary is located, as equally sacred.

It is often said that Turtle Island is a haunted place – haunted by the loss, grief, and erasures that plague it as a result of settler colonial violence. In this new body of work, Crazybull attempts to grapple with this sense of loss, particularly the loss of ancestral knowledge, forging new connections to these sites – as well as her own family and relatives – by dismantling colonial frameworks of wayfinding, and replacing them with visual information that disrupts and challenges our understanding of what information is considered to be valuable; how this value is determined; and by whom.

In this exhibition, Crazybull reflects on what the land remembers; the ways in which these memories come to the surface; and the role that our bodies play in summoning these memories.