Maria Hupfield: Performance Documents
See video documentation of performances by Maria Hupfield that invite you to think about what objects mean and encourage you to actively engage with your surroundings, ideas, and experiences.
Maria Hupfield’s practice is collaborative. In her high-spirited performances she works with artists, writers, and musicians to create some works, while objects, histories, and stories are her partners for others. Her exhibition at the Wex, Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan), includes a presentation in The Box of three videos documenting her performances.
Experience an improvised score titled 4 Bodies 1 Screen (2020; 76:38 mins., video), a performance made on the Zoom platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, with her collaborators T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Ayana Evans, and Esther Neff, Hupfield explores our bodies’ relationship to the many screens in our lives and enacts community building despite their physical separation.
In The Silver-Tongued Taste of Progress (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018; 5:59 mins., video), Hupfield works with sound tools—handmade objects that are worn, carried, and activated through performance. Silver tongue is a slang term for settlers who negotiated treaties with Indigenous peoples only to break them as they sought and enacted their inequitable idea of progress.
In the third video documentation, The One Who Keeps on Giving (2018; 16:16 mins., video), Hupfield develops a performance with her siblings inspired by their mother’s 1974 painting of the shores of Parry Sound in eastern Ontario. The title is an English translation of their mother’s Anishinaabe name.
IMAGE CAPTION
Maria Hupfield, The One Who Keeps on Giving, 2017 (still). Two-channel video. Performance with Hupfield family members Deanne, Johna, John, and Maria. Courtesy of the artist.
"I learn so much about people in performance art whether it is me, the other artists, the host venue, or the audience."
Maria Hupfield