YOU SEE ME - KIWAPAMIN
A Group Exhibition
April - June 2026
Wanuskewin Heritage Park in the Greg Yuel Gallery
Featured Artists:
Audie Murray, Brody Burns, David Garneau, Melanie Monique Rose, Torrie Ironstar, Wally Dion
Curated by Rowen Dinsmore
Opening Reception April 4th, 2026 6:00PM – 8:00PM
Workshop details coming soon.
Throughout history, the practice of portraiture has served as a powerful tool to represent oneself and others through painting, drawing, sculpture, or photography. In contemporary art, portraiture extends far beyond resemblance. It has become a way to explore concepts of selfhood, memory, cultural identity, and power dynamics. Artists may use abstraction, symbolism, performance, or digital media to question who gets represented, how, and why.
In this broader sense, portraiture is not just about depicting a face or figure; rather, it is about interpreting identity and negotiating relationships between the subject, the artist, and the viewer. Across this exhibition, portraiture appears through symbolic objects, gestures, environments, ancestral materials, and intergenerational ties, emphasizing that presence can be felt, sensed, and remembered as much as it can be seen.
Indigenous Canadian portraiture began with pre-contact visual traditions such as carving, beadwork, and regalia, where identity was embedded in material, land, and kinship rather than likeness alone. During the colonial era, artists like Paul Kane and later photographers such as Edward Curtis portrayed Indigenous peoples through a romanticized, ethnographic lens that reinforced colonial narratives and fixed identities in time. In the mid-20th century, artists including Norval Morrisseau and Shelley Niro reclaimed portraiture to assert Indigenous agency and challenge misrepresentation. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, figures like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster, and Rosalie Favell transformed portraiture into a medium of self-representation and critique. Contemporary Indigenous portraiture now blends traditional, performative, and conceptual practices to affirm presence, complexity, and futurity – shifting control of the gaze back to Indigenous creators.
Given this long and complex history, this exhibition examines portraiture through emerging and established Indigenous artists who expand and challenge what a portrait can be. Rather than offering singular or fixed representations, the works presented engage with ancestry, ceremony, land, language, bodily knowledge, and lived experience. Through photography, performance-based mark-making, painting, sculpture, and digital processes, these artists explore how identity and representation are carried across generations, how they are shaped by colonial disruption, and continually reclaimed.
With featured artworks by Audie Murray, Brody Burns, David Garneau, Melanie Monique Rose, Torrie Ironstar, and Wally Dion, You See Me – Kiwapamin invites viewers to reflect on the multifaceted approaches to representation through art. Together, the works ask viewers not only to look closely, but to consider portraiture as an act of reclamation, expression, and recognition.
Photos by Carey Shaw
A Note from the Curator
You See Me - Kiwapamin, is a group exhibition that brings together Indigenous artists who engage with expansive approaches to representation and by doing so, compel viewers to look closely – to consider portraiture as an act of reclamation, expression, and recognition.
As the curator, I have focused on how portraiture and all of its complexities can open up a dialogue between artist, subject, and viewer, extending beyond likeness alone to reveal layered portrayals of Indigenous identity, memory, and presence.
In Plains Cree, “Kiwapamin” translates to “I see you” or “I will see you again” – Across this exhibition, portraiture appears through symbolic objects, gestures, environments, ancestral materials, and intergenerational ties, each work emphasizing that presence can be felt, preserved, and revisited as much as it can be seen.
Before entering the gallery, we are first met with our own reflection – our own portrait – urged to consider ourselves and the context in which we are stepping into. What is my role in this space? Who am I? Why am I here?
Inside, works of art that encourage the same lines of reflection fill the space. Energetic portraits by Wally Dion, Torrie Ironstar, and Brody Burns command the room, grounded in figuration and interwoven with portraits by Audie Murray, David Garneau, and Melanie Monique Rose, works that expand beyond the figure and request a second, closer look. Relating through shared themes of presence, memory, and identity, as their varied approaches to representation and medium reframe how portraiture is understood.
'Benny Button' by Brody Burns dances through projection-mapped animation, depicting his niece, the first powwow dancer in his family. Across the space, 'Rooted in Who I Am' by Torrie Ironstar mirrors this figure — grounded and resolute — connecting a shared story of reclaimed ancestry and cultural pride across generations.
Flanking the gallery entrance, 'Ablution (Rock to Stone)' by David Garneau and 'chi fii embraces the old ones' by Audie Murray both share the presence of stones as portraits. These stones, though distinct in form and approach, are connected in meaning, for in many Indigenous epistemologies, stones are relatives with presence, memory and knowledge.
Anchored between them and completing a triangular relationship across the space, Melanie Monique Rose’s film ‘NUTR PIYII - Motherland’' plays on loop, tracing her connection to land, ancestry, and inherited memory.
In Garneau’s work, a stone rests in a sink beside running water and a bar of sunlight soap. Here, he suggests that a rock becomes a stone when brought into human use, drawing a parallel to the imposed “civilizing” of Indigenous people through baptism, reflecting on the painful histories of children and adults made to feel unclean and taught to wash away the “dirt” of their own skin.
Directly across from this work, Wally Dion’s 'Rachel' presents a collage portrait of a woman wearing cultural braids that signify her strength and spirituality. With a gaze that suggests heightened vision through multiple eyes, the work extends beyond likeness, offering a portrait that reveals inner life, perception, and presence.
Exiting, we are met with our reflection once more and reminded of Kiwapamin – “I will see you again.” Perhaps new or unexpected ways of seeing have surfaced: What about yourself or your ancestry would you preserve or reimagine? What does it mean to see others, and to be seen?
Displayed together in dialogue, the artworks that coalesce as You See Me - Kiwapamin share stories of reclaimed identity through times remembered, lived, and re-imagined by their artists.
Rowen Dinsmore,
Curator