The sculptural work of Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill explores the fallacies embedded in colonial concepts of property, economy and family. Her works frequently frame Western systems of capitalism and control as both imposed and impermanent, emphasizing the endurance, power and radical potential of other surviving knowledges and economic practices. Often engaging the physical, historical or symbolic properties of the materials she works with, past projects have seen Hill variously use tobacco, found objects and deaccessioned museum artifacts to consider questions of labour, land, value, and reciprocity.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Hill presents M*****, a project that deepens the artist’s long-term inquiry into structures of kinship. Bringing together a suite of new works in sculpture, drawing and cameraless cinema, the exhibition sees Hill reflecting expansively on economies of parenting and reproductive labour. Harnessing references ranging from spores and parasites to Nadya “Octomom” Suleman, these works gesture toward an experience of motherhood that is multiplicitous, non-linear and visceral, both bound to and more than the limits and binaries frequently invoked by the word “Mother.”