Lauren Crazybull
Home: Vancouver, British Columbia
Title: Blood, peace, periphery, light.
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 122 x 91 cm
Website: laurencrazybull.com
Instagram: @elceebee
ARTIST STATEMENT
Growing up isolated in foster care left me with a sweeping desire for belonging. The first time I met Faye HeavyShield, seven years ago she traced my foot on a sheet of paper. The second time, she gifted me a pair of moccasins she had made from the tracing. As Blackfoot people we carry a profound sense of loss and love and we know to give wholeheartedly. When we talk on the phone, I know I am talking to someone who lives and breathes art and carries a sense of home wherever she goes. My love of painting will take me places I’d normally never go. Faye once said that art brings us places the way our nomadic life as Blackfoot people used to.
There is a Caravaggio book in my studio that I keep as reference with reverence for the old masters of painting. In my studying of chiaroscuro and seeking to understand the careful planning and layered approach, I see restraint that I’m not used to in my own work. Slow and steady would not normally be words I would use to describe my practice.
I’ve tried to paint Faye twice before, but the paintings weren’t quite right. One was her in front of her home, the second facing completely away. This being my third try, I thought there was something about embracing both the presence and absence that the other portraits had. Faye and I are both from the Blood Tribe in Southern Alberta. This painting emerged from the end of our most recent visit after Kainai Indian days. We sat in a hotel lobby in Lethbridge and the morning light made only a part of her face visible. With her eyes falling into the shadow I worried I might lose an essential part of the portrait, yet while sitting with her image, I noticed a quiet softness and depth that I had not anticipated. My portrait practice is born from all the representations of Indigeneity that I have ever seen. There is a common, romanticised one-dimensional image of Indigenous people that I try to avoid. All of the parts that we carry: visible and hidden make us whole. This is what I was searching for: tenebrism. When I asked Faye what she thought after I painted her portrait, she replied: “Blood, peace, periphery, light. You allow all.”
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Lauren Crazybull (b. 1994) is a Niitsítapi (Member of Kainai First Nation), Dené artist currently living in Vancouver, BC. Through a practice of oil painting, Lauren considers Indigenous presence and signifiers. By reconfiguring photographic imagery, she seeks to generate new understandings and representations of Indigeneity. Within her paintings, fluctuating moments of celebration and grief often coincide. By visualising multiplicities, her paintings offer a place to live with agency and freedom without the constraints of logic.