Lauren Crazybull's MFA Defence: I've Always Been Away

Friday, November 24, 2023 | 2:30 PM | FREE
Room 4390 – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

What relationship do we have to the eternal? I’ve Always Been Away is a oil-painted triptych showing a steady emergence of figures revealing the simultaneity within contemporary Indigenous presence. The triptych shows a restructuring of reality; unresolved figures with fluctuating destinations, temporalities and relations. The figures produce the spaces they occupy, a world is created around them based on a responsive painting process.

This work is an untelling of Indigenous representation. Painted figures are abstracted by the colour red, blurring the distinction between the Indigenous form and caricaturist projection. How can imperfect understandings of Indigeneity provide evidence for our continued presence?

An unresolved figure cultivates potential and carries wonder.

In the painting I’ve Always Been Away, I painted a world with imagined figures who live in the undefined and dance towards abstraction to live infinitely.

Keywords: Indigenous representation, Contemporary painting, Untelling, Indigenous presence, Figurative painting