Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps On Giving (2017)

Maria Hupfield is an Indigenous artist from the Wasauksing Nation (Anishinaabe Nation settled along Georgian Bay, north of Toronto, Ontario) and now based in Brooklyn.

The One Who Keeps on Giving is an English translation of the artist’s late mother Anishinaabe name and this was in many ways an homage to her since her passing. Part of the exhibition is a two video installation that is centered around a painting by the artists’s mother, Peggy Miller, of the waters in Georgian bay and this painting was in their family home while growing up

Hupfield invited her siblings to perform a response, or the story of this painting - one video is filmed in Georgian bay, and Hupfield holds the painting away from the camera, so only herself and her siblings can see. In a second video which faces the first in the gallery, Hupfield holds the painting facing outwards, and this video was filmed in a contemporary art space, the power plant, in Toronto.

Hupfield who has done several performances related to disrupting the idea of tour guides - such as leading guided tours through the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian - I consider this as a Indigenisation of the audio guide or audio description.

Through regalia, dance, bells, drumming and song, the performers/ family convey to us meaning of the Painting, of the space, of the water.

This makes me call into question our use of language, of words to describe a work of art, I am reminded to question this as a product of euro-western ideology and ways of knowing and understanding.