Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/01/2025 - 20/06/2025
11:00 am - 5:00 pm

Location
McMaster Museum of Art

Curated by: Alex Jacobs-Blum and Kim Anderson
January 7 – June 20, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 30th, 2025 | 5 – 8PM (Remarks at 6PM)

Artists: KC Adams, Carrie Allison, Judy Anderson, Hannah Claus, Elizabeth Doxtater, Charlene Vickers, Marie Watt

We are in a time that requires us to reimagine our relationship with the Earth, calling for a return to Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous communities seek guidance from women in this healing process, as they are said to hold sacred feminine connections with the Earth. At the same time, the Earth holds maternal connections in caring for us.

Ascending Horizons invites us to consider embodied connections, cycles and seasons of the sacred feminine, connecting women in creation and re-creation. The exhibition explores how Indigenous women activate their connection to the natural world and dream of new worlds for future generations. Tethering land, water, the moon and the cosmos to Indigenous women’s bodies, the exhibition honours and celebrates the sacred cycles of creation and movement, birthing bodies and their grounding in the fertile capacities of earth in relation to the pull of the moon and the sky world.

Through transdisciplinary artistic practices: cornhusking, photography, video, performance, installation, ceramics, beadwork and embroidery, each of the seven artists call upon their own Nations’ thought systems and the knowledge of their Ancestors toward an infinite and regenerative future. The works illuminate Indigenous worldviews through longstanding material connections, building with and from sand, clay, cedar, corn husks, fur and copper, demonstrating how these connections provide teachings about place-making among human relations and beyond. Further, the works show how adorning the body through tattoos, jingles, or the exquisite clothing of cornhusk dolls can become a means of healing. Material comforts such as blankets, felt, buttons and beads speak to the nurturing presence of women across generations, while the use of reprography film and aluminium remind us that Indigenous practices are continually evolving alongside new materials. This weaving of the past and the future blends ancestral knowledge with contemporary practices, reaffirming the boundless, adaptable and ever-evolving nature of Indigenous creativity.

Ascending Horizons builds on Haudenosaunee and Algonquian teachings to re-envision elements of the natural world – from Earth to Sky – to consider how we navigate between them and reimagine a future alongside the creative capacity of Indigenous women.

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