Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill at COOPER COLE

Artist: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: September 21 – November 9, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to announce The Spider Plays, the second solo exhibition by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill at the gallery.

This exhibition delves into the activities of an imagined group of spiders as they experience fear, anxiety, and the threat of violence, as well as the inextinguishable forces of collectivity and creativity. The “plays” in this exhibit are multi-page works on paper, layered in ink and collage. Text is structured on the pages as concrete poetry, with stage directions and dialogue arranged into the shape of spiders, the paper becoming the wall the spiders are sitting on.

Several sculptural elements in the space invite visitors to imagine the spiders’ world at a human scale. Stairs leading to a constructed walkway running the length of the exhibition space encourages visitors to climb up to see works hung higher in the gallery, enacting a kind of choreography where the bodies of the visitors against the wall might mimic the bodies of the spiders in the works on paper. The sculptures — a pair of silk pajamas with four arms, sneakers covered in fine hair-like threads — are directly inspired by the spider plays, drawing viewers into a human-scale interpretation of the plays.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (b. 1979, Comox, British Columbia, Canada) is an artist and writer working primarily in sculpture and drawing. Often, her projects emerge from an interest in capitalism as an imposed, impermanent, and vulnerable system, as well as in alternative economic modes. Her works have used found and readily-sourced materials to address concepts such as private property, exchange, and black-market economies. Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective seeking to decentre Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art, prioritizing instead land-based teachings and Indigenous epistemologies. Hill is Cree and English, with maternal roots in the Michel Band and Papaschase. She lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwxwú7mesh,̱ xʷməθkʷəyə^̓m and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

Hill received her MFA from the California College of the Arts, and a BFA and BA from Simon Fraser University. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; the 59th Venice Biennale; Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble; Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon; Art Gallery of Alberta; Mercer Union, Cooper Cole, Gallery TPW, Toronto; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.