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Faye
HeavyShield: body of land
March
15 to April 28, 2002
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Alberta-based
artist Faye HeavyShield draws inspiration for her work from her
experiences growing up on the Blood Reserve in southern Alberta and her
life as a Blackfoot woman. Using
her personal history as motivation and inspiration for her work,
HeavyShield often begins her process with journal writing. From her
writing she extracts particularly intense and poignant memories which she
turns into drawings, these drawings inform her sculptures, which are often
realized through the use of multiples.
For
the exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery, HeavyShield will present a new
work. Body of land is an intimate and personal landscape constructed of
over 200 "portraits" which are made out of copies of close-up
colour photographs of human skin. The images are formed into cone-like
objects, reminiscent of the shape of a teepee, and pinned to the Gallery
wall. According to the HeavyShield, "my environment includes family,
language/narrative, the land and the configuration of objects on the
gallery walls is my attempt to convey the scope of this personal
landscape. Each portrait is a body. Of
knowledge, histories and stories both real and imagined."
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Bio:
Faye
HeavyShield was born and raised on the Blood Reserve in the southern Alberta
foothills. She has studied at the
Alberta College of Art and Design (1980-1985) and the University of Calgary
(1985-86). Since the early 1990s
her work has been exhibited throughout Canada in numerous important solo and
group exhibitions since including; Land, Spirit, Power, National Gallery of
Canada (1992); Heart, Hoof, Horn,
Glenbow Museum, Calgary (1993, traveling); She:
A Roomful of Women, Thunder Bay Art Gallery (1994); Nations in Urban
Landscapes, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (1995); and Spiral and Other
Parts of the Body, La Centrale/Powerhouse, Montreal (1997).
HeavyShield's work is held in public and private collections throughout
North America, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Kelowna Art Gallery
and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.
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