Marcy Friesen: Pê-mîciso
to
Fazakas Gallery 659 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1R2
Marcy Friesen, "Smile With Me," 2021
inkjet print, 24″ x 30″
Fazakas Gallery presents the solo exhibition Pê-mîciso by Marcy Friesen as part of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival. Friesen is of Swampy Cree and Welsh ancestry and currently resides on a mixed farm with her family near Carrot River, Saskatchewan. She comes from a long line of traditional master beaders, and for Friesen, beadwork is about ancestral memories, family, and community. In this exhibition, beadwork is photographed as a cultural belonging. The work both honors and departs from its traditional symbolic representation, responding directly to Indigenous community and personal experience.
Pê-mîciso (Cree language: come eat) is about the consumption of bodies, love, loss, sources of life, and decoloniality. This lens-based solo exhibition features two series of photographs by artist Marcy Friesen: Legacy (2021-2022), comprising 12 portraits, and Pê-mîciso (2020-2022).
The exhibition provides an embodied experience in which visitors will encounter photographic series on two separate spatial dimensions: vertically and horizontally, simulating a supper setting. The viewer is invited to partake in an act of visual consumption, and a question is pointed: who or what is being consumed in this supper – Food? Body? Nature? Cultural symbolism? Ancestral imagery? And, who are the consumers?