Audie Murray: I Am You And You Are Me

Curated by Tomas Jonsson

April 15 to May 19, 2023 at Dunlop Art Gallery, Digital Lounge (Central Library)

9 minutes 57 sec

This video explores intergenerational relationships through acts of care, dreams, body and land. This film was originally inspired by a personal dream experience and is specific to a place that feels like home. Shared as documentation of a performance piece done in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, the central action of braiding continues out of frame alluding to the idea of infinitely intertwining body and land. Throughout the documentation, the film becomes gradually less opaque until the shot is transformed into a slightly vague hand-drawn animation of the night sky depicting the constellation of Pakone Kisik. Although, this image can also be understood as a spider's eggs or a cluster of beads. This work is purposefully layered in the literal sense through the layering of video documentation and hand-drawn animation, but also in the sense that this work explores many different themes and concepts all at once. A grounding aspect of this work is the felt connection to land through the braiding of hair and grass together. This act calls to attention the relationship between us, place, and the cosmos, allowing for the bounds of humans and earth to be blurred.

Audie Murray is a relative, dreamer, skin-stitcher and Michif visual artist based in Oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan; Treaty 4 territory). Much of her family and family histories are located in the Qu’Appelle and Meadow Lake regions of Saskatchewan (Treaty 4 & 6 territories). Murray holds a visual arts diploma from Camosun College, 2016; a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Regina, 2017; and is currently an MFA student at the University of Calgary.

Her practice is informed by the process of making and visiting to explore themes of contemporary culture, embodied experiences and lived dualities. These modes of working assist with the recentering of our collective connection to the body, ancestral knowledge systems, space and time. She has exhibited widely, including at the Independent Art Fair, NYC; The Vancouver Art Gallery; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; and the Anchorage Museum. Murray is represented by Fazakas Gallery, located on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory (Vancouver, B.C.).

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