Dr. Margaret (Marmie) Perkins Hess Gallery

Untelling
October 4, 2024 – January 11, 2025

Artist: Lauren Crazybull

Curator: Josephine Mills

In Untelling, Lauren Crazybull engages with Nicholas de Grandmaison’s artworks from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection. In a new body of work, Crazybull uses portraiture to capture moments of contemporary Blackfoot life. This exhibition invites viewers to consider the layers within portraiture and the artist-muse relationship. Using painting and photography, Crazybull explores the potential that lives within the undrawn, unpainted, and unfinished spaces suggesting that these voids hold possibilities for new narratives.

Proof that I exist

“I am interested in only telling certain parts, untelling certain parts, keeping the bodies and the parts from becoming a settlement.”¹

Nicolas de Grandmaison was a portraitist active in the mid-twentieth century, especially in Alberta where he was laid to rest in the cemetery in Brocket. De Grandmaison’s portraits are complex; they live on as imperfect documents of Indigeneity. His own subjective views on Indigeneity are laid over the portraits: sorrow, stoicism and romanticism echo through his work because he was convinced that Indigenous people and their culture were vanishing.”² I’m conscious of the coupling of sorrow with Indigeneity and the idea that Indigenous people belong to the past. I’m aware of disappearance in relation to Indigeneity. I’m not interested in correcting or refuting these ideas, but I would like to see how it feels to place my painted portraits next to de Grandmaison’s pastels.

In June and July of 2024, I traveled around Southern Alberta to photograph Blackfoot people from my home community of Kainai Nation. I took photos in Lethbridge, Standoff, Cardston, and Brocket. I photographed 17 people. The prairies feel infinite, the landscape uninterrupted. The places we passed in the car all bear memories, this is evident through how the landscape is shaped, named and interacted with. I hold only fragments of this memory.

Other fragments of memory exist in de Grandmaison’s work. The works of his I selected for Untelling are predominantly unfinished. The figures seem to fluctuate between disappearance and emergence. Something is kept from the viewer, and an elusiveness exists in the spaces left blank. Parts of the sitter’s faces are rendered while other sections are left with only an outline or grid pattern. I found there to be a potential in this unknown, and possibility beyond disappearance: to not be solidified in someone else’s representation, to be elusive, to be free, to be infinite.

This work is a declaration of existence and an expression of love to my Blackfoot family and friends who live with humour, strength and refuse to settle within imposed boundaries.

¹ Morrill, Angie, Eve Tuck, and Super Future Haunts Collective. “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It,” 3. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 12, no. No. 1 (2016).

²Hugh Aylmer Dempsey and Nicolas de Grandmaison, “The Indians of Western Canada,” essay, in History in Their Blood the Indian Portraits of Nicholas de Grandmaison (Vancouver u.a.: Douglas & McIntyre, 1982), 34.

Thank you to each person who trusted and allowed me to take their portrait, this work would not exist without you. Thank you to everyone who met me, invited me for a meal, shared a story – It was an honour to connect with you, if only for a moment. Extra thanks to Blaise and Sandra for accompanying me and driving me around Treaty 7.

Jared Fox

Blaise Bastien

Gertrude Spear Chief

Faye Heavyshield

Keilan Heavyshield

Shelley Prairiechicken

Donna Atwood

Smokey Littlelight

Lorenzo ManyFeathers

Joseph Yellowhorn

Wes Crazybull

Chad Creighton

Dan Crazybull

Sandra ManyFeathers

Martin HeavyHead Jr

Hali Heavyshield

Henry Heavyshield

Thank you to the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery staff for meeting with me starting in 2022 and being so generous with the art collection and knowledge of Nicolas de Grandmaison. Thank you for working alongside me and making this work possible.

Josephine Mills

Jon Oxley

Juliet Graham

Andrea Kremenik

Chad Patterson

David Smith

Kirsten Meiszinger

Blaise Bastien

Additional Thanks:

Thank you Andy Hotte for your endless support. Thank you to Michelle Robertson and Kellen Spencer for hosting me during my stay in June. Thank you to Contemporary Calgary for your support and bringing me back home to Treaty 7 in July. These works were created in my studio at 221a in Vancouver.