Lauren Crazybull at Contemporary Calgary

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Lauren Crazybull, “are we made of this place?,” 2025 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Landscape, memory, and legacy combine in an open-ended narrative exploring how Indigenous lands have been transformed into heritage tourism sites. What does it mean to witness and inhabit ancient ancestral lands?  What does the land remember? How do such memories come to surface? And what role do our bodies play in arousing such memories? 

These evocative questions reverberate in Wish You Were Here, an installation created by artist Lauren Crazybull at Contemporary Calgary until Nov. 2. The work inhabits several locations in the building, which viewers are encouraged to discover on their own.

Crazybull reflects on the commodification of sacred Indigenous sites while taking viewers on a hauntingly poetic journey through ancestral lands in Ksahkominoon, the traditional territory of the Niisitapi. 

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Lauren Crazybull, “July 19, pt 2.,” 2025 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Integrating painting into subverted tourist tropes like information signs, directional signage, and postcards, Crazybull places her work in unexpected places that quietly confront and disorient viewers, echoing the unsettled state Indigenous communities occupy as a consequence of settler colonialism.

As the second artist participating in the gallery’s Ksahkomiitapiiks residency, under the mentorship of Faye HeavyShield, Crazybull visited the Iniskim Umaapi Majorville Medicine Wheel and the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage site in July 2024. As the artist describes in a pamphlet placed on a rack outside the entrance to the upper atrium, “Every few kilometres, an ultramarine blue sign would appear, marked 'Medicine Wheel,' making it obvious that we were on the right track.”

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Lauren Crazybull, “Medicine Wheel,” 2025 (photo courtesy of the artist)

The pamphlet, cobalt blue ink printed on 8" x 11" white paper folded into quarters, contains six postcards. The cards depict the remote location from various views with the most poignant still capturing the sunlit prairie grasslands, as far as the eye can see, with a dark shadow etched onto the landscape, standing resolute within the photographic frame.

The documentary style of the postcards contrast with the other works which contain elements from nature painted abstractly and in fragments or captured on signage in poetic musings written by the artist.

For example, as you walk through the entrance, a wooden tourist sign covered with a framed canopy, almost skeletal in form, fills the alcove. Labeled with a blue sign imprinted with word information painted in white, the front panel consists of seven paintings assembled into a visual map. These fragmented images are like snapshots and include pinkish white clouds floating in blue sky, cigarettes arranged on green grass, glistening water, vegetation, and a hand grasping its own wrist.

These images are fleeting, almost ghostly, and appear as meditations on place or conceptual renders that evoke memory or time. Such sensorial imaginings or quiet contemplations are echoed in other works. Sign posts topped with rectangular blue signs are imbued with white text, written in first person, conjuring images about overgrown paths or the details of a vast and shifting sky that canopies a sacred site built over 4,500 years ago from living rocks.

Crazybull, a Niitsítapi (Member of Kainai First Nation), Dené artist currently living in Vancouver, BC, was drawn to making the work as a Blackfoot person accessing tourist sites marked by grief, loss, and erasure caused by settler colonialism. The installation marks her navigation through ancestral sites, forging a personal connection to land, kin and memory through a poetic dismantling of colonial systems (such as tourism) to contemplate our relationship to Indigenous knowledge, ceremony and sacred land. ■

Lauren Crazybull, Wish You Were Here, is on view at Contemporary Calgary until Nov. 2, 2025.

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