tensions | amy malbeuf

Events

tensions is an exhibition of tarps, bison hide, caribou hair, rabbit fur, beading, bear grease, inheritance, and quiet resistance. Embracing a deeply personal connection to materials and process, Amy Malbeuf presents a nuanced portrait of Métis familial ties—their connections and gaps, in celebration and condemnation. In one work, “Prairie Wolves,” Malbeuf extracts a poetic description of Métis people from an otherwise derogatory text, “a little touched with the prairie wolf.” By beading this phrase on a blue poly tarp, she reclaims this powerful description as a celebration of resilience, resourcefulness, land, and beauty. The tension created through this appropriation of pejorative texts is expanded throughout tensions, to create a sense of identity in suspension between objects and frameworks, care and protest, subject and context, shame and pride, history and future. tensions creates subtle portraits in how we navigate the objects, traditions, knowledge, legacies, and relationships that we inherit, and places them in material conversation with land, animal, gesture, and kinship.