Oftentimes, visions of the everyday can pass us by without making us blink.

For Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, multidisciplinary artist, writer and assistant professor in Emily Carr University’s Audain Faculty of Art, the everyday is a space that has only just begun to reveal its secrets. In the commonplace, she sees a rich material vocabulary, brimming with potential. In the concept of “ordinary,” she sees a “hierarchy of knowledges” overdue for dismantling.

To engage artistically with such concepts, Gabrielle fittingly starts with what is closest at hand.

“I often work with materials that are sourced from plants, or dollar stores, or things I find in the street; things I already see around myself in my life,” she says. “I think materials definitely speak a language. I hope mine talk about everyday experiences, the charge and the possibility in those common things.”

Some days, says Gabrielle, a wander around a neighbourhood can be enough to both renew a connection to the here-and-now, and to locate herself within the broader movement of history.

“Sometimes I just like walking down the street and picking thistles and dandelions and appreciating these tough little plants,” she says. “But sometimes I learn about the stories of people who have left whatever object behind, and sometimes I can connect into larger sweeping narratives of change and history when I learn about the materials I work with.”

This keen sense of how materials can both speak to connections and unearth the elemental in the everyday is clearly on display in the works that make up Gabrielle’s current solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York City. Titled Projects: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, the show runs through Aug. 15, as part of MoMA’s Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/gabrielle-lhirondelle-hill-sees-a-wide-open-world-freed-from-the-impossible