Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill

Four Effigies for the End of Property

September 18 - December 19

College Art Gallery 1

Presented by Cooper Cole, Toronto 
coordinating curator, Leah Taylor

Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill’s sculptures and installations in Four Effiegies for the End of Property and installations perform as both a material exploration of colour and form and an enquiry into concepts of land, property, and economy. Each work in the series considers an idea or mechanism through which the land was turned into private property: preemption, improvement, highest and best use, and belonging.

Four Effigies for the End of Property is about two different but related concepts: private property and sculpture. L'Hirondelle Hill wanted to know how lot #274 came to be property under the law of Canada, how it was expropriated from the Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh First Nation, how it came to be understood as the rightful property of settlers, and how that idea became naturalized in the minds of so many Canadians.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Métis artist and writer who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Hill’s interdisciplinary artwork—encompassing sculpture, installation, video, and photography, among other mediums—uses found materials to probe concepts of land, property, and economy. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Canada, where she is represented by Cooper Cole (Toronto) and Unit 17 (Vancouver). Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective. Her writing has also been published widely, and she is co-editor of the anthology The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (2015). She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA and BA from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

IMAGE ABOVE: Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Part Three: The Highest and Best Use (detail), mixed media sculpture, 2017 installation image. Courtesy the artist.