Visual PDF
Published 2024
Author: Kay Slater and Lei Sabaupan
Introduction to alternative text catalogue:
The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!
Creative Access Descriptions:
Cover (front):
The cover is a dusty yellow background with a close-up view of Boucher’s installation work centered on the page, framed with a black border. Surrounding the bordered image are exhibition details: ‘grunt gallery, April 4th, 2024 to June 1st, 2024’ at the top and ‘Maria Margaretta Cabana Boucher, a memory of you: of holding, of carrying together’ at the bottom. The installation work in the center is zoomed into the bottom of a light wooden framework that forms a triangular shape resembling a tent. It is held together with intricately seed-beaded yellow rope attached to white, flower-patterned, gauzy fabric stretched all around the peak of the structure. Centered beneath the tent structure is a printed square photograph of yellow flowers and dark blades of grass framed with a large white border, similar to a polaroid. On top of the polaroid is dried braided grass of the same yellow shade as the flowers. Underneath the printed image are round rocks of varying sizes supporting the print off of the floor.
Cover (back):
This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation shots from the 2024 exhibition. The images listed are named and described throughout the alt text catalogue as they appear.
Cover inside:
The cover’s inside (front and back) pages are a single image that runs across the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The front inside page contains an image of the exhibition, as seen when one enters the space and looks to the left of the gallery.
There are two lawn chairs on the left side near the wall. The leftmost chair’s back and face are woven with yellow beaded, loomed chair straps in a criss-cross pattern (over and under). Rocks sit on top of the chair seat in a cluster. The lawn chair to the right is slightly larger, woven in the same manner in blue and olive green. Slung over the chair is a white, gauzy, flower-printed fabric (the same one outstretched on the tent structure from the cover page).
Beside the chairs are two video projections, in likeness with the chairs, the left projection is smaller than the right one. Attached to the wall of the left projection are two wooden L-shaped supports and yellow beaded rope exactly like the tent structure, suspending a beaded net through which the light of dark green grass image is projected. To the right, on an adjacent wall, part of the projection is shown, featuring a toddler’s hand reaching for the same grass. In the middle of the gallery is a white platform on which a log, blue flannel, and pieces of wood are placed. The back inside page features the right wall, a candy blue expanse with white vinyl text over top a printed flower pattern, the same flowers as the gauzy fabric from the cover.
Page 1:
The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.
The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.
The credits read
grunt gallery
a memory of you: of holding, of carrying together
Maria-Margaretta Caban Boucher
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Jennifer Smith
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2024 grunt gallery. Artwork copyright 2024 the artists. Text copyright 2024 the authors. All images courtesy of the artists.
Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.
grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.
Page 2 and 3:
The double-page image shows the same tent-like structure from the cover sitting off-center to the right, in front of the candy blue wall. The same floral pattern from the gauzy fabric decorates the wall in a deep blue colour while white text over the pattern reads ‘And as you learnt you remembered and taught the next generation how to look, how to remember too. We moved, felt, dream, learnt, and remember together.’ A bright spotlight obscures some of the white text. Under the wooden tent-frame are two thick bordered prints of natural water and field scenes propped up on stones.
Page 4:
A pale yellow page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of a dark wooden log. Sitting on top of the log is a navy blue and black flannel top, loosely folded. On the flannel, there is fine bead embroidery using black, yellow, and varying shades of blue beads that form ornate shapes of flowers, leaves, stems and roots.
Page 5:
A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction”.
Page 6 to 9 and Page 10:
The essay is laid out in two columns across page 6, interrupted by an image on page 7, and continues until page 9, concluding in one paragraph and one column. The page 7 photograph is a close-up shot of the smaller, yellow lawn chair. Sitting close together on the chair are three rocks: one long, oval and grey, one small, round and brown, and one tiny and white.
The essay reads:
When I really adore something or someone, all the complimentary words that apply when describing them fly out of my head because it feels critical to me in that moment to find the exact right way to describe them and their work. And as I’ve come to know her over the years through our nebulous network of art ndns both here and across the prairies, I do adore Maria and the work in this exhibition. Maria is someone who I’ve always admired–a woman who keeps “Michif Milf” in her instagram profile and shows up to Hotlatch in a bedazzled denim ball cap and wearing a mesh shirt while really very pregnant is easy to find affection for in my world. Especially when she outlasts the night on the dance floor over you.
Last year I attended a VQFF screening for the film, Runs in the Family, and the writer (and star) Gabe Gabriel was in attendance. During the talk back session, he was trying to describe his father (who directed the film) of whom the endearingly shameless and hyper-supportive father in the film was partially based off of. Gabriel’s shoulders came up as his body compressed, mic pressed to his chest for a moment as he tried to explain what specific qualities he draw from his father to make this character and what he came up with was something that’s stuck with me ever since; he described his father as someone who was, “deeply concerned with getting love right.” Getting love right.
Another sentiment that comes closer from within our community, is a line included in our very talented novelist friend, Jessica John’s debut novel, Bad Cree. I say included because as I was reading it I felt like I had heard it before; “what have we got to do with all this time but get it right?” This line is attributed in the endnote acknowledgements to our dear friend Jade Baxter.
Both of these quotes speak toward an active way of doing love, and one which openly acknowledges that mistakes will be made and that there are in fact very wrong ways to do love. In Maria’s initial letter included in the proposal for this exhibition she refers to her daughter Mino as “her little spirit bead.” Spirit beads in many Indigenous cultures refer to a concept of humbleness; the accidental mismatched or misplaced bead in a work signals to us that we are not meant to exist or create in godlike perfection. Love, to me, is not made from perfection either, but instead from the messy, sprawling (continues on page 8 to 9) and continuous work of collaborating with another human being to understand and help fill one another’s needs and affirming each other as places of safety to make mistakes within that goal.
There are versions of this essay that started in thinking through this exhibition as an expression of motherhood, or more broadly, of parenting. However, I don’t have much business in that conversation as neither a parent nor someone interested in publicly ruminating the details of their own complicated relationship with their mother. I’ve come to think of this show as being about inheritance. Inheritance not as vanity, but as love and radical resistance. Bringing our cultures with us to the frontlines of survivance offers a place to locate ourselves in what is otherwise an endless and confusing onslaught of both direct and indirect pressure to conform to canadian colonial capitalist culture. Despite fraught familial relationships and dispossession and displacement from my own land, my culture is the last line of defense in preserving my sanity and what reminds me most to keep to both my own principles and the broader principled resistance of my people. There was a before to which we are indebted, and as long as we survive, there is a future to which we are obliged to pay forward. This exhibition, drawing inspiration from both Maria’s grandfather and her daughter, does that work.
What I have heard Maria speaking about over the weeks leading up to the exhibition, as a small team of us helped with beading ropes for some of the works on sunny spring afternoons in the studio, was towards an urgency of knowing which of these works will help carry the cultures within Mino forward. These works serve as a kind of survival kit; tangible objects with stories and territories embedded within them that are meant to be touched, felt and passed down. They are also objects that will suffer wear and accept repair as time goes on. The purpose of this exhibition, as I understand it, is that Mino will have these touchstones to always know who she is, that she will not have to search endlessly for that foundation or feel uncertain of where she belongs within the proud histories she descends from. This is no blithely proposed or romanticized inheritance; when I think of the Potlatch Ban on the west coast and how much was disrupted and what objects sacred, ritualistic and domestic were lost in that process for my own people, I understand deeply this need of artists to create new repertoires of our work for future generations. Who are we to invest more beauty in, if not our own people?
I haven’t asked Maria directly what her thoughts of motherhood and parenting are or how she feels about the role, but what comes through so clearly in her work to me is that she’s trying to get love right and will take her time in figuring out what that looks like for her and her family. Love is an active motivation, not a milestone to reach and possess. There will be a day for Mino where her parents will pass into memory, and a day too where she passes into the memory of future generations; but in the meantime, we’re each here to try and get it as right as we can in a world swallowed by empires, with what precious time we have.
Page 10:
A pale yellow page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up view of the same work described in the inside cover: two perpendicular wooden supports jutting from the wall to which the beaded yellow rope is tied. It secures the glittering beaded net through which the grass image is projected.
Page 11:
A white page titled “Jennifer Smith, Offerings of Intimacy”.
Page 12 and 13 to Page 16:
The essay is laid out in four columns across both pages and concludes on page 16 in a single column. Interrupting the text on page 13 is a picture of two white hands holding a portion of the same intricately seed-beaded yellow rope used elsewhere in the show. On the white table are tactile objects complimentary to the work: a small glass jar of the seed beads, a piece of dark wooden bark, a small brown rock, and plastic netting made from oblong pearl coloured seed beads.
The essay reads:
I remember finding a charm bracelet at some point in my childhood. This charm bracelet had several charms, a drum, an axe, and feather. I didn’t wear it, but kept it in a small jewelry box I was given as a little girl where I kept special things. In my memory, I was told at some point that this bracelet was my grandmother’s (my father’s mother).
Before I was born both of my paternal grandparents, my Métis grandparents, passed away. I have stories in me about them that I remember, but I don’t always know where they came from or who told me. Sometimes I recount these memories or stories I was told to my dad and he tells me that they are incorrect, or he will share a story from his youth that goes against something I believed about my grandparents my whole life. Even though I never met them I always, even from a young age, tried to be connected to them or know things about them, especially my grandmother. I heard stories that my grandmother loved ‘costume jewelry’. I don’t know where I heard that, but it’s something that has stuck with me all my life. I have always loved to adorn myself, I sometimes wondered if this was because I wanted to be like my grandmother, or if it was inherited, or if there is even a difference between those two things.
Recently I showed my mom the bracelet and said I think this was dad’s mom’s and she said no it wasn’t, but didn’t elaborate on where it came from. These foggy connections/memories that I possibly made up as a kid allowed me to take time to be with my grandmother, to pick up the bracelet and think about where she would have worn it, to wonder what kind of relationship we would have had, and plainly just to have her with me for a little while. Even though it turns out this bracelet was not hers and some of my memories were incorrect, I was able to find ways to remind myself that the tether between me and my ancestors could not be broken. That I could always find them when I needed them.
Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher’s exhibition, a memory with you, is the embodiment of this tether. An exhibition dedicated to her daughter, and to future generations, while honouring her ancestors. An exhibition that was conceived while her daughter was transitioning in her womb, preparing to come into this earthly world. An exhibition planned for her, for her to have memories, to have a physical representation of the love for her. Of the generations upon generations of love that came to this exact point where she exists and can see everything handed down to her mother and now to her.
I initially thought of the exhibition as a place of witnessing love and intimacy, but the more time I have spent with this I’ve thought of the exhibition as an invitation. An invitation that is both to witness, and to be part of the intimacy if we so choose. I do not necessarily mean intimacy with Maria directly, but if we are open to it we can learn about the different ways we love and find each other through generations or family and kin. We might be able to understand our own connections through this example of world building for Maria’s girl.
Using materials, objects and installation that are very personal to Maria, but also would be familiar to most Métis people, the space holds Maria’s own family story and beautiful cultural material, knowledge, and memories.
The gallery recreates a family camp, a place where relatives worked together, had fun together, got to know each other in deep ways that are hard to come by in daily life unless we are conscious and careful to ensure we make space for that intimacy.
Describer’s note: The following paragraph is written in lowercase with no grammar across 20 lines. The paragraph has been rewritten to flow for screen readers and text-to-speech, and follows the cadence intended by the author, as understood by the describer.
In the camp there are so many special details that hold space for the love of a mother and daughter:
adult and child size camp chairs side by side,
rocks placed on the small chair,
a light gauzy fabric with a flower print that echos the print of flowers on the wall,
an axe adorned with a beaded cover surround by wood and with beaded fabric and a small beaded strawberry left as a surprise,
prints depicting water and grasses are in a small structure that you can see into, and raised off the ground on rocks,
an area set up to get to know the materials used in the room through touch,
projections of beadwork connect to each other and are made tactile
through beadwork installed on the walls becoming a part of the projection,
a small wooden triangular structure covered in the white gauzy fabric with a flower print on it,
a paper with family names, and polaroid image of a building with a dried flower.
It is an exhibit full of offerings, these offerings include love and intimacy, but it also has a sense of being lived in, not a place that comes together overnight, but a place that has come together over time with care.
I imagine the rocks left by Maria’s girl on her own seat to come back to, but then there is one on the adult chair, a gift found and left for her mother.
The beaded strawberry stuck into the wood I can imagine a child playing with and admiring their mother’s beading and putting it down as they move onto their next interest or adventure.
The torn up piece of paper on the wall with family names and picture of a structure, an offering acknowledging ancestors and ways of living.
I imagine the white gauzy fabric as an offering to the spirits of Métis women, who are often invisible in the stories of our histories. The one place Métis women are always present is in the name we are sometimes called, The Flower Beadwork People, women were the beaders in our communities, and so we are always centred in this name.
The fabric left on the chair, or in the installation with the wood, I imagine being used to wrap a child to keep them warm, or to cover the child during chest feeding. Moment of closeness, where that physical loving contact echoes and is held in the fabric.
An offering to every visitor to be welcomed in and to be let into a space of love, to feel materials, to spend time surrounded in care.
And most of all this offering to Maria’s girl is an exhibition born of love that holds space for knowledge that is not just about physical presence, but about connection to things we cannot see.
The gallery is intended to be a place that honours creating memories, the work has been created for Maria’s daughter to know her art, to know her ancestors, and be an active part of what the gallery holds. The exhibition exemplifies the ways that for Indigenous people art and life are not separate, they are entangled. These memories being made are real, are tactile, and will remain with Maria and her child. A very thoughtful and intentional love to hold onto the past, to know the past and to be able to feel it in the future.
The exhibition will happen for a time, will be in this specific physical form during its run at grunt gallery, it may be remounted in the future, but it will never be exactly as it is now. Also allowing it to be a memory, one that may be recounted accurately, or may get foggy over time, may be remembered by one person slightly differently than another person. However it will always be able to be felt, and the amazing thing about feelings is there is no right or wrong way to feel them. Maria’s girl will be able to feel the love her mother puts into her, the dreams she has for her, the intentions she manifested for her daughter to know her, her artworks, and their ancestral gifts. Objects made by Maria will likely find their way to future generations in her lineage and will keep those people connected to her, the ways I found ways to continue connecting to my grandmother.
Page 17:
A pale yellow page, the same colour as the cover, features a stacked pair of black-bordered photographs. Pictured in the top photograph are two wooden logs on a wooden table, placed perpendicularly to each other. One small log is angled at fourty-five degrees, the other large log is wrapped in yellow beaded rope, placed vertically and partially out of view. Under them is the same gauzy fabric folded neatly beside an elaborately beaded pink strawberry. Pictured in the bottom photograph is a wooden axe resting on top of a large rectangular piece of wood. The axehead is covered with a yellow felt sheath, decorated with purple, yellow, and white beads along the border and beaded designs of a colourful fish, flowers, and strawberries.
Page 18:
A white page with text. Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher’s name is bolded. It reads:
Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher is an interdisciplinary Red River Michif Artist from Treaty Six Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her family has historic ties to the Métis communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She is currently making and living on the stolen territories of the SKWA-mish, tSLAY-wah-tooth, and MUSS-quee-um Nations. Utilizing traditional beadwork practice merged with contemporary mediums she considers how this duality serves as both an act of reclamation and commentary on cultural hybridity. Navigating Indigeneity through the lenses of both the settler and the settled, Maria-Margaretta attempts to negotiate her sense of self through the implications of existing in a colonial system. Using Métis’ identity as a place of transformation she questions how memory, personal experience, and ancestral relations influence her understanding of self.
On the bottom left of the page reads ‘Biographies’.
Page 19:
A white page with text. Jennifer Smith’s name is bolded. It reads:
Jennifer Smith is a Métis curator, writer and arts administrator from Treaty One Territory. She is the President of the board for the Coalition of Canadian Independent Media Art Distributors, and works with the boards of the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (or NIMAC) and Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (or MAWA). As a curator she focuses on researching craft based contemporary art, women’s work and feminism. Jennifer has curated exhibits and video programs for the Manitoba Craft Council, Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Open City Cinema, MAWA, the Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library, and has been published in Studio magazine. In 2018 she was the Indigenous Curator in Residence at aceartinc.
Page 20:
A white page with text, a letter from Maria to her daughter reads:
Daughter,
I made these works for you, my future ancestor. I created this document, these pieces, this Michif self-archive for you. So you wouldn’t have to search my name, dig deep for my stories. You could speak with confidence to who I was and what I loved. I created this work so you would know my stitch, you would recognize me by the way I placed my beads. You would never feel alone amongst beaded objects because you would know they are family, and you are home.
I imagined you adorned and protected as you carried the knowledge of our ancestors in those same threads. I imagined you studying and learning from my designs and one day creating your own. Your fingers touching the surface of the fabric, memorizing the textures, the shapes, the tension of the threads. And as you learnt you remembered and taught the next generation how to look, how to remember too.
I made these works so our ancestral ties would never break, past, current, and future ancestors could live in reciprocity together in the worlds we have created for one another. I made these works so you would know you belonged to me and I to you and through our shared lineage we would hold each other up in our remembering.
I imagined you as a great great granddaughter searching for my story, eased in knowing I loved you, as I reached out to you through our shared objects. In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that you, my future ancestor, were already here with me. Growing inside me, breathing with me, becoming. That as I created these works I was also creating you. A trickster just like her mother hiding out of reach until you were ready to announce yourself. And with you came my world. With you came a clear understanding of the world I am building, the world I have rebuilt for you, Kiihtwaam ooshtaahk, rebuild little one.
These works are my first gift to you, these words are my gift to you my daughter. Marsii, Miigwetch, thank you for collaborating on these works with me as we moved, felt, dreamt, learnt and remembered together. My little spirit bead, my gift from creator.
I love you, gi-zaagin, ki shaakiihitin
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