Fields

Kiona Callihoo-Ligtvoet, Khim Hipol, Marina Levit, Evan Robinson, and Two Smudge

Curated by Dana Belcourt

6 Apr to 18 May 2024

Fields is a group exhibition which presents work from artists Kiona Callihoo-Ligtvoet, Khim Hipol, Marina Levit, Evan Robinson, and TwoSmudge discussing their experience of growing up, and growing into their identity. The coming of age genre has historically focused on cisgendered, heterosexual, white perspectives on what it means to grow up. Fields focuses on voices which are often underrepresented within dialogues of youth, childhood, and the uncomfortable experience of transitioning into adulthood. These narratives are explored and engaged with in different ways and through different mediums by each artist including photography, painting, beadwork, and print. The exhibition brings new perspectives into the coming of age narrative to include not just a transition from youth to adulthood, but perspectives on how each artist came into and express their ways of being and identity. 

By delving into their own personal experiences, histories, and archives each artist puts forth work concerning identity, youth, growing up, and being. Kiona Callihoo-Ligtvoet and Marina Levit do this through large scale paintings with clearly rendered figures. Evan Robinson mixes painting with cyanotype photography and illustration to capture an otherworldly creature. Khim Hipol uses a more traditional form of photography printed on fabric. TwoSmudge also utilises fabric as well as print and bead work to invoke feelings of place and identity in his work. Each piece shares a story unique to each artist developing contexts to the richness of identity and personal histories.

Bios: 

Evan Robinson (b. 1999) is a member of the Nisga'a First Nation of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Born in Edmonton, AB, he is currently working towards completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Alberta. Robinson's work was most

recently displayed in a solo exhibition entitled "LOOK OUT BELOW" at Soft Gallery (August 2023). 

The son of an immigrant on his mother’s side and a member of the Nisga’a Laxgibuu (wolf clan) on his father’s side, Robinson often seeks a mixed perspective through his work, drawing influence from his diverse background. He grew up in north-central Edmonton, AB, constantly surrounded by advertisements, graffiti, and the sound of heavy traffic. Robinson frequently combines urban practices such as paste-up and spray paint with traditional printmaking and sign painting techniques. He draws comparisons between opposing art practices and challenges the line between ‘low’ and ‘high’ art. 

This notion of combining diverse art traditions manifests in his installation work, where he pairs alternative process photographic enlargements with illustrated ink paintings. These paintings make reference to creation stories told by his First Nation.



 

Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist practicing in amiskwaciwâskahikan on Treaty 6 Territory. She grew up West of the city near the hamlet of Calahoo where she lived with her relatives on a quarter section of land her moshom (Ernie Callihoo) still cares for. Her family lines are Cree and Métis descending from Michel Band, as well as Dutch and mixed European. 

Kiona works in painting, printmaking, drawing and installation, recollecting personal stories of grief and tenderness. Her practice uses a non-linear telling of her memories through narrative work as a form of diaristic archiving. It draws from feelings of loss and enfranchisement, but also from deep belly laughter, mundane gestures, and a gentle fondness for where the histories between herself and her family overlap and disperse.

Kiona has had solo exhibitions at The New Gallery, Calgary, AB (2023), Harcourt House, Edmonton, AB (2022) and Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB (2021). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, Edmonton, AB (2021), Khyber Art Centre, Halifax, NS (2021), Neutral Ground, Regina, SK (2022) and Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH (2023). She co-curated these bodies heal slowly and in our own time (2023-24) and the soil between plants (2022) with Making Space, and What’s Held through TREX and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2022). 

Kiona was a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor Emerging Artist Award (2022) and The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (2023). Her debut graphic novel with Conundrum Press, We Were Younger Once (2022), was a nominee for the The Doug Wright Award for emerging talent, and she is working on her second graphic novel to be released by Emanata Press in 2026. 

 Working alongside other artists in initiatives of community care, Kiona co-organizes Making Space in partnership with Sanaa Humayun. She likes visiting her moshom on the farm, and gossiping with her mom, relatives, and friends on the prairies.


 

Marina Levit (b. 2001, Winnipeg, MB) is a painter based in so-called Vancouver, BC. They create oil paintings that flicker between figuration and abstraction, as a response to micro narratives that exist within their everyday. They seek to unravel and queer ways of seeing through an interaction between subject matter and the visceral experience of paint. Drawing from cell phone photography from their everyday as reference, they at once carefully plan their compositions, as well as trust the immediacy of intuition. The activations of their painting that arise from this process gestures towards a queer elsewhere within the minutiae. They received a BFA from Emily Carr University, with a Visual Arts major. They have exhibited their work in the Michael O'Brien Exhibition Commons, The Neighbourhood Gallery and the Object Corner within Emily Carr University, and the Gas Station Theatre in Winnipeg, MB. 



 

Naatsikapamatoosin - Two Smudge

Matthew Provost, is a Siksikaitsitapii (Blackfoot) designer, printmaker, beader, and visual artist from the Piikani Nation within the Blackfoot Confederacy. Matthew continues to utilize research as a component of design to recreate contemporary elements of Niitoyis (Lodge’s). His practice is broad while also focusing on regalia making through sewing, beadwork, and leatherwork. Matthew is an up-and-coming designer focusing on cut and sewn designs. From pattern making to garment construction, he creates his designs to challenge the boundaries of Indigenous concepts of fashion.

 

Khim Mata Hipol (b. 1999, La Union, Philippines; North Vancouver, BC)  is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the Squamish, TsleilWaututh, and Musqueam people. Hipol focuses his work primarily on lens-based media and has expanded to printmaking, sculpture, and text. By investigating the impacts of colonialism and the Filipino migration it caused, Hipol considers how identity and culture cross-pollinate between the Philippines and Canada. His positionality, which lies between these two colonized and colonial structures, is the motivation behind his practice, at once highlighting and complicating these systems. He graduated with a Certificate of Photography (2019) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Major in Photography and a Minor in Art and Text (2023) from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Hipol is a recipient of the Audain Travel Award (2022), Chick Rice Award for Excellence in Photography (2023), An honorable mention of the Seymour Art Gallery ‘New and Emerging’ (2022) and was long-listed for the Lind Prize (2022). He has shown his work in his solo show at The Lobby, Union Christian College, in Philippines (2023) and duo show at Ciano Umuk, Bauang, Philippines (2024) and Gordon Smith Gallery, North Vancouver (2023). He shared his works in group shows at FIlter Photo in Chicago Illinois (2024), Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon (2024), Pendulum Gallery (2024), Akasha Art, Toronto, Ontario (2024), Access Gallery (2024), The Center of Fine Arts Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA (2022), Contemporary Calgary, Calgary, Alberta (2022 and 2023), and Vancouver and Philippines (2023). His works have been privately collected in Canada, the USA, and the Philippines.


 

Publication
Related texts

Fields and Fields and Fields

Dana Belcourt

Fields and Fields and Fields

 

Fields presents work from artists Khim Hipol, Kiona Callihoo-Ligtvoet, Evan Robinson, Marina Levit, and Matthew Provost which considers the “coming of age” narrative. The coming of age genre has historically focused on cisgendered, heterosexual, white perspectives on what it means to grow up. Fields prioritizes voices which are often underrepresented within dialogues of the uncomfortable experience of transitioning from childhood to adulthood. The coming of age genre also focuses on youth, when in reality people navigate coming into their ways of being throughout their life as a continuous process. In each work, the artists speak to how they relate to and see the world through an array of mediums including painting, photography, beadwork, and print.

 

A lot of my childhood was spent in a field. My brother and I would go to play soccer and practice being goalie and striker, go to the park to play grounders, and make friends with whichever kids were in the neighborhood. We didn’t have cable at the time, and I was happiest outdoors experiencing the world. As I got older, I was excluded from conversations centered around the TV shows and movies people watched growing up since I didn’t have access to them for parts of my childhood. My coming-of-age happened outside, where I didn’t watch the same cartoons and TV shows as my other classmates. This didn’t make my growing up experience any less real, just different. The differences in growing up, memory, and ways of being is what Fields aims to explore. 

 

By recontextualizing frameworks around growing up we can begin to understand different perspectives on the so-called traditional coming of age narrative. Books and movies have very often presented a narrative of a young white, heterosexual, cisgendered boy growing up as the basis of a “relatable” experience. This can be seen in media such as The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (the book and the movie), or Stand By Me (1986). Even more recent examples such as Ladybird (2017)—which does feature a female protagonist—still adheres to a cisgendered White perspective. Fields emplores viewers to consider perspectives often left out or exiled from the narrative. 

Some of the work in the exhibition does this in a direct approach. Matthew “Two Smudge” Provost’s Niitoyis - Home was originally part of his chicken dance regalia, where dance is integral to the celebration and continuation of Indigenous culture. The beadwork is representative of a Blackfoot lodge (or tipi) when viewed from above. The other wearables contrast the traditional and bring Indigenous wearables into the contemporary. Fashion comes to the forefront of identity and embraces both Indigenous traditions and futurisms in these pieces. His accompanying pieces Foothills and Niistapiiski - Real People, are maps which have been printed over and are directly indicative of the place he’s from and grew up, a pillar to shaping who he is. 

 

Khim Hipol’s work also lends itself well to discussions of identity, ways of being, and connection to place. The self-portraiture addresses ideas of understanding who you are, where you come from, and how you relate to the current context in which you find yourself. Hipol’s carefully curated composition and props showcase elements of his Filipino identity such as foliage, crowns, and flags— juxtaposed with a more traditional style of studio-based Western photography. Although he is the only subject, surrounded by the darkness of the studio, we can infer place immediately by the context clues of Filipino symbolism. Furthermore, his self-portraiture contrasts Western ideologies of portraiture, which privilege  White subjects. 

 

Evan Robinson takes photography in a different direction in his work sewer, where a printed cyanotype is part of a collage, serving as a backdrop to an ink drawing of a figure emerging from a hole. The photo presented is taken from his personal archive, shown alongside this more graphic figure. The figure itself is wearing a device on its head, perhaps aiding the memory of the photograph in the background. Robinson invites us to critically examine the ways technology plays a role in the production of memory, and how documented experiences are often prioritized (and perpetually reprioritized) through their recollection. Is the memory in the photograph as important to his personal narrative as it seems? 

 

Marina Levit also engages with this question in their paintings. In their studio practice, they often paint from photographs in their phone’s camera roll, transforming pictures into collaged representative and abstract paintings. In Too Old For Hopscotch, we see a figure from below, jumping over abstracted rocks. Over the entire canvas, a hopscotch game appears in negative and positive shapes. Levit’s work engages with youth and innocence from an adult’s perspective. Upon closer examination of the figure we infer the individual depicted is an adult rather than the small figure of a child. They present here a return to growing up and childhood, as well as finding joy in creation, play, and times gone by. 

 

In Kiona Callihoo-Ligtvoet’s painting not a goodbye, she engages with growing up from the standpoint of her sibling. In this piece, a reunion of siblings is depicted, deep in the wildfire season, on the farm of her moshom. This piece acknowledges those who grew up with us and how they are deeply intertwined and familiar with how you grew up, and the circumstances which make you who you are. The tenderness of an embrace tells us these individuals are inherently bound together by time, place, memory, and the ways in which they grew up. 

 

Each artist presents their own version of how they came into their way of being through the uncomfortable experience of growing up and stepping into one’s own. The myriad of cultural contexts shown through different mediums highlight the richness of experience and ways artists find themselves. Fields presents the idea that there is no standard way of being, and no standard way of growing up. The experiences which allow us to transition from youth to adulthood are complex, nuanced, and unique to each individual, and we each must find ways to share, rejoice, and hold space for one another throughout our lives.