TENSIONS

Amy Malbeuf

The Illingworth Kerr Gallery is pleased to welcome back ACAD alumna Amy Malbeuf for her first institutional solo show in Calgary. Malbeuf is a Métis visual artist from Rich Lake (AB), who works in a variety of media, including performance, beadwork, installation, and video. Her exhibition at the IKG, entitled tensions, focuses on the artist’s signature use of tarps as an artistic material. Mundane, industrial, colourful, accessible, utilitarian: tarps bring elements of reality and the quotidian into Malbeuf’s work. In the artist’s hands, it becomes a resilient and indestructible canvas on which she inscribes her reflections associated to the exploration of identity, place, language, and ecology. These reflections transform hierarchies within materials and the contemplative processes of animal hair tufting, hide tanning, and beadwork. Malbeuf’s artworks act like protest signs or mementos, that play with the contrast that generates in bringing together traditional textile based techniques and raw industrial materials.

Amy Malbeuf is a Métis visual artist from Rich Lake, Alberta. Through utilizing mediums such as caribou hair tufting, beadwork, installation, performance, and video Malbeuf explores notions of identity, place, language, and ecology. Malbeuf has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at such venues as Art Mûr, Montréal, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Art Gallery of Alberta; and Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua, New Zealand. Malbeuf has participated in many international artist residencies including at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia; The Banff Centre; The Labrador Research Institute; and Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico. Malbeuf holds a MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. In 2016 Malbeuf received a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and a William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists in Canada from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

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