Electro-acoustic - The Breath | The Stomach | The Mother | Water (life)

These electroacoustic works explore the conception of the universe, primordial earth, and the emergence of life. It’s a mini conceptual EP of sorts and meant to be listened to as a collective.

Instrumental - Our Blood Mother, Elementerra

This piece is about our connection to the Earth (the first mother) and the source of life and Tongue (language). There is also the use of the word Blood in the title of the music, which I feel invokes a lot of invocative imagery – Our Blood is what connects us all. Also, the word Blood in the title is alluding to my Blackfoot cultural background. I am from the Kainai/Blood Tribe which is one of the 4 tribes that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy. I also like the word Blood as it is a powerful signifier to myself and has the codes for many magical imageries I hold dear to my heart.

My creative endeavors are focused on the rematriation of narratives and oral history. I adopt a feminine linguistical practice of naming my songs. I like to provide them with Spirit/deity names that personify/anthropomorphize our human emotions and our abstract relationships with natural phenomena. Elementerra, is a combination of the words Elemental and Terra (Roman Greek Goddess name for the Earth). We are all connected by the Blood and Tongue birthed from the womb of the first mother, Elementerra.

"These works reference the iconic buffalo/bison that are slowly being reintroduced to the Blood reserve, Waterton, and Banff areas (Treaty 7 Territory).

 

The buffalo were not only a food source for Blackfoot people, but also depended upon for hides, bone, and sinew that womxn prepared for both regalia and ceremony.

 

Traditional colours are used that show the beautiful and familiar landscapes of the southwest prairies. Further, symbolism that relate to Siksikaitsitapi are also embedded in the artwork to communicate the interrelatedness of land, art, and Indigenous lifeways".

Views - Acrylic on Canvas (24” x 36”), Mar. 9, 2019

 

"The Rocky Mountains of Southern Alberta are the views from the Blood Tribe reserve reminding me of home. The acrylic painting reflects the mountain like patterns along with the traditional colors used in Blackfoot ceremonies. Representing my connection to both spirituality and the land."

 

Divine Feminine - Watercolor medium (11" x 14"), Feb. 4, 2022

 

"This piece represents the healing and revitalization of the divine feminine within society and our collective experiences. Through the evolution of the past year and the ease that covid has allowed for us to slow down and heal inward our feminine energies that each of us carries."

 

Home - Welded Scrap metal sculpture (4.8' x 3'), 2020

 

"The sculpture uses organic mountain-like shapes, tipis, moon and sun, inspired by the Sundance Ceremony practiced on the Blood Tribe reserve. The physical aspects of the sculpture reflected on both the top and bottom of the sculpture represents the duality of my personal life experiences. Images, patterns and designs depict my relationship with the land and my home seen in southern Alberta."

 

“In Pablo Neruda’s Ode to the Dictionary, the poet writes 'I am of the earth and with words I sing.' I have taken this line as an inspiration or jump-off point for the poems in this selection. Passerine, titled after the order of songbirds, is both a means of honouring the animals that call Inglewood Bird Sanctuary home, as well as an exploration of the connections between song and place/land.

 

While some of the poems and their imagery are explicitly about birds, Spring Thaw and Flight for instance, the guiding theme linking these poems is the land as a source of voice or as a source of song. My work, in this selection and beyond, explores the connections between stories and the place(s) they are born from.

 

I believe that anywhere we go we will find its narratives are a feature of the landscape. The poems included in this selection use song to celebrate family and love, such as N or Houses Made of Pollen; they are songs of mourning and longing, such as For John or Flight; they are also protest songs against our treatment of the environment or colonialism’s short-term memory, as in Spring Thaw or Before the Colonel. Passerine is my small attempt to map the geography of a place through voice and through song.”

“My name is Tara Manyfingers, born in Cardston and I grew up in Calgary. I am currently a multimedia artist and Masters of Fine Arts student at the University of Calgary. This work was completed in 2018 from a collection of photos. It is summertime and I am perched over my mother’s kitchen sink, ever so slowly sipping my coffee, trying to be very still. It is six o-clock in the morning before anyone in the household has woken up. I am here in the hopes of catching a brief glimpse of magnificence that the hummingbird effortlessly exudes.
 

Silkscreen requires photo negative exposures onto the screen, and CMYK is a division of the color spectrum into cyan, magenta, yellow and black. First I used distortion photoshop techniques to make the hummingbirds all look more painterly. Then, just like the inside of certain color printers, I split the images into four layers each. The first two images, I blocked out the entire skyline, in order to swipe my own color mixed sunset. What you see here is a collection of the most successful prints of this 2018 series.”