Love the Skin

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Mel Lefebvre, “Healing Through Ancestral Skin Marking,” 2024

series (courtesy of the Gallery)

Featuring Meagon Anishinabie, Darla Campbell, Mel Lefebvre, and Amy Malbeuf.

This exhibition features four Indigenous artists who work intimately with skin. It explores the act of working with skin as connection to life: people, animals, the earth, and oneself. Skin is a barrier and a form of protection, but it is also permeable and changeable. Traditionally, animal skins have been transformed into rawhide and leather for use as homes, clothes, footwear, and musical instruments since pre-history. Animal skins become a second means of protection, but also a means of self-expression and decoration. Similarly, tattoos can become clothing, protection, self-expression and decoration as a tradition in many cultures around the globe. Not only are the end products protective and beautiful but so is the creation process through the artists’ self-extension through touch, sight, and even breath as acts of deep love and care for the world around them.