09.26.2020 | 11.15.2020
INTO THE STREETS PUBLIC ART SERIES: GRANNY DORA | LAUREN CRAZYBULL
As an Into the Streets public art project in conjunction with the exhibition TSIMA KOHTOTSITAPIIHPA WHERE ARE YOU FROM? Lauren Crazybull’s mural Granny Dora is presented in the east-facing window of the SAAG. As Alberta’s 2019 Artist in Residence, Crazybull used their funding from the provincial government to reclaim the familial and geographic knowledge lost to them in the child welfare system. As part of this project, they travelled to Fort Mackay to meet with their grandmother for the first time in over a decade. There, Crazybull began to reclaim their relationships to land, language, and kin and later immortalized the meeting in a painted portrait of her grandmother which would be used as a source for her vinyl mural.
Granny Dora is painted in the moment where the artist’s grandmother looks to the artist, describing the history of Fort Chipewyan and their distant, shared origins. Crazybull’s caring rendition of Granny Dora and the work’s presentation as a public-facing artwork restores authority to the portrait’s subject, especially the Indigenous one. The turning pose and direct gaze of the subject as well as the work’s larger-than-life scale maintains Granny Dora as an active individual that cannot be reduced to an object to be owned or kept in a museum.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Curatorial and Publications Coordinator
Lauren Crazybull is an Edmonton based Blackfoot, Dene visual artist. Lauren’s most recent work has looked to explore the tension and power within portraiture by examining the subtle relationship between themself and the subjects they paint. By centring the gaze, beauty and rich humanity of fellow Indigenous people in their recent work, Crazybull means to ask poignant questions about how Indigenous identities can be represented, experienced, celebrated and understood through the particular gaze that artistry casts and requires. In 2019, Lauren Crazybull was appointed as Alberta’s first Artist in Residence. In 2018, they were awarded the McLuhan House year-long studio residency. Before fully immersing into the visual art world, Crazybull worked for four years in radio and broadcasting focusing on Indigenous issues. Following that, they worked for two years as the art coordinator at a centre for at-risk youth. Through this work, Crazybull understands that their creative power is a poignant way to assert their own humanity, and advocate, in diverse and subtle ways, for the innate intellectual, spiritual, creative and political fortitude of Indigenous people.
Image Credit | Lauren Crazybull, Granny Dora, photographic mural on perforated vinyl, 2020. Image courtesy the artist.
