“Daughter, I made these works for you, my future ancestor. I created this document, these pieces, thisMichif self-archive for you. So you wouldn’t have to search my name, dig deep for my stories…”
Inspired by her grandpa’s hunting shack and her daughter’s ancestral home lands, Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher reaches for the space between worlds in her solo exhibition, a memory of you: of holding, of carrying together. In this exhibition she extrapolates, expands and focuses in on beaded works and structures as a way of building forward with new archives of work, mindful of the gaps and omissions that she would like to not be repeated when passing her lineage to her own daughter. Running counter to a long history of assigned anonymity to Michif women in the archive, she is using the space of this exhibition to reclaim agency and position her beading practice as resistance to the erosion of cultural memory.
Maria-Margaretta is an interdisciplinary Red River Michif artist from Treaty Six Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has ancestral ties to the Métis communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, Manitoba and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She is currently making and living on the stolen territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations. Maria-Margaretta holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art+Design and an MFA from OCAD University. Her practice is an exploration of the Michif self archive, autobiographical beadwork and objects of the everyday. Using Métis identity as a place of transformation she questions how memory, personal experience, motherhood, and ancestral relations influence her understanding of self.
Photo by Dennis Ha.
Digitized Programming
Publication catalogue:
Designed by Vicky Lum and printed by Moniker Press, free, physical copies of the catalogue are available in the gallery while supplies last.
A PDF version with images is available to explore here.
An Alternative-Text version is available to explore: Plain text, Audio.
Creative Access Audio Tour:
Soundcloud: streaming audio
creative-access-audio-transcript-plainText-aMemory
Floor Plan:
A 02-memory-floorplan from the exhibition. A tactile map was created and has been archived at grunt gallery. Information about the tactile map is available within the Creative Access Audio Tour and was used as a reference tool for self-guided movement through the show. Contact archives@grunt.ca to learn more about the tactile map.
Virtual Walkthrough: