Artist: Gabrielle Hill
Exhibition title: Loose Spells
Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
Date: March 28 – May 4, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto
COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Gabrielle Hill. This marks the first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Gabrielle Hill’s Loose Spells drawings were made through a labor -intensive process over the fall and winter of 2018-2019 that included coating paper repeatedly in a homemade tobacco-infused Crisco oil, then applying pigments and allowing the paper to dry for several months at a time. While the works were drying, Hill collected ephemera from the neighbourhood: dandelions and other assorted wildflowers, beer can tabs, magazines and dollar-store charms. Once the oil had fully dried, she was able to carefully sew and glue these small tokens to the paper. The resulting drawings are both delicate and tough, translucent in areas, odorous, and materially connected to Hill’s daily life. The images, which the artist calls “spells,” recall trash-strewn sunsets and billowing clothes on a backyard line. The idea of these works as “spells” points to Hill’s ongoing interest in the connection between the ephemeral and the real, and can be connected to earlier works such as her sculpture series Four Effigies for the End of Property, which she describes as “images of ideas that intend to have a kind of power over those ideas.”
(quoted in The Capilano Review 3.35/ Spring 2018, p. 26).
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (b. 1979, Comox, BC, Canada) is a Cree and Metis artist and writer. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Most recently, her work has shown extensively in Canada at Unit 17, Polygon Gallery, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; the Alberta Art Gallery, Edmonton; SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montreal; and STRIDE gallery, Calgary. 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’s writing has been published in many places, most recently in Beginning With the Seventies (Helen Belkin, 2019). She is also the co-editor of The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (ARP 2009) and Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (Wildred Laurier 2017). Hill lives and works on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh people.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #3, more than money, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cut outs, beer can tab, thread, 14.5 x 11.5 in (36.8 x 29.2 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Loose Spells, 2019, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #9, sunrise on dark, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, wildflowers, tobacco flower, magazine cutout, spider charm, thread, 13 x 9.75 in (33 x 24.8 cm) Framed; Spell #8, sunset on clark, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, wildflowers, beer can tab, tape, 13 x 9.75 in (33 x 24.8 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #2, lying out on the gravel, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, dandelions, bluebells, thistles,magazine cutouts, 13.5 x 11 in (34.3 x 27.9 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Loose Spells, 2019, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #7, those streets are gone, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutouts, charm, beer can tab, thread, 13 x 9.75 in (33 x 24.8 cm) Framed; Spell #6, at the bus stop, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paints, magazine cutouts, tobacco flower, 13 x 9.75 in (33 x 24.8 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #11, for cages, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutouts, cigarette, thread, tobacco flower, beer can tab, 12 x 11.5 in (30.5 x 29.2 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Loose Spells, 2019, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Loose Spells, 2019, exhibition view, COOPER COLE, Toronto
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #4, Billow, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, tobacco flower, tobacco pendant, magazine cut outs, thread, 13.5 x 11 in (34.3 x 27.9 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #10, for unsticking, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutouts, snake charm, tobacco flower, beer can tab, thread, 13.5 x 13 in (34.3 x 33 cm) Framed
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Spell #5, tony’s story, 2019, Tobacco-infused crisco oil, oil paints, tobacco flower, tobacco pendant, magazine cutouts, thread, 13.5 x 11 in (34.3 x 27.9 cm) Framed
