LOOP Barcelona Video Art Fair 2026: Meryl McMaster
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to be invited to present Meryl McMaster's nipēhtēnān kiteh | We Can Hear Your Heartbeat. This will be the gallery's 8th participation at Loop, the first one was twenty years ago. The gallery is proud to be celebrating its 25th anniversary this Fall.
Since its creation in 2003, Loop Fair has stood out as the first fair dedicated exclusively to the discovery, promotion, and acquisition of contemporary artists’ films.
Each year, Loop Fair takes the pulse of emerging moving image languages through a carefully curated selection of works presented by its galleries, both local and international, invited by an international committee of specialists.
Loop Fair aims to redefine traditional art fair models and modes of presentation, taking into account both changing attitudes toward viewing and interacting with art, as well as the specific characteristics of moving image practices. Loop Fair offers a unique viewing experience by presenting each artistic project in a hotel room, creating an environment that focuses on the artists’ work and facilitates the specific attention this medium requires.
nipēhtēnān kiteh | We Can Hear Your Heartbeat,10 minutes 31 seconds, 4K, 2023
A song, a story, a coin, a travel pass.
These small family tokens serve as the portal to this video work, which explores memory, movement, and Indigenous resilience through the lives of my three paternal grandmothers. Spanning 130 years on the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, their collective experiences speak to the realities of brave, proud women striving to live truthful lives as the unsettling modern world collided with the ancient. kā-āyimahk, they would often say in the Cree language. It was difficult.
The spark for this project began in the pages of two surviving diaries belonging to my great-grandmother, Bella. Her 1947 diary casually noted the textures of daily life under the Canadian government's system of forced assimilation: children attending state-run day schools, families digging for Seneca root to sell to the pharmaceutical industry, and breaks from routine centred around visits with friends, funerals, or the Sundance, a sacred ceremony that was outlawed by the government at the time. Reading between the lines revealed what was missing, specifically the intimate details and generational knowledge restricted or erased by colonial laws like the Indian Act, which heavily policed the movement and rights of Indigenous people.
This video work steps into those historical gaps, using family keepsakes to piece together a fragile, imperfect narrative out of the spaces left by state-enforced erasure. A central visual and thematic motif in the work is the contradiction of the railroad. For a century, the train held a powerful dual presence: while it offered my grandmothers new avenues for love, adventure, and interconnection, it simultaneously acted as the literal engine of state control, threatening the autonomy of their communities and enabling European settlement on Indigenous land.
I retrace their journeys along forgotten paths, filming the landscapes where the natural world has slowly reclaimed these old roads and train tracks. Navigating the space between colonial history and intimate family recollection, the work forms mental impressions of who these women truly were, proving that even in the face of systemic absence, presence can be powerfully reclaimed through the act of storytelling." MM
Meryl McMaster is a Canadian artist with nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), Métis, British and Dutch ancestry. Her lens-based practice incorporates the production of hand crafted materials and performance forming a synergy that transports the viewer out of the ordinary and into a space of contemplation and introspection. She explores the self in relation to land, lineage, history, culture and the more-than-human world.
McMaster is the recipient of the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award, Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists, the Canon Canada Prize, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, the OCAD U Medal and was short listed for the Recontres d’Arles New Discovery Award 2019, the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles 2019 and long listed for the 2016 Sobey Art Award.
Her work has been acquired by significant public collections within Canada and the United States, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Heard Museum, the Eiteljorg Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian.
McMaster’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Montclair Art Museum, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Merignac Photo, Canada House London, Ikon Gallery, Ryerson Image Centre, The Glenbow, The Rooms, Momenta Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, amongst others. From 2016-2020 her solo exhibition Confluence travelled to nine cities in Canada, including stops at the Richmond Art Gallery, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, and The Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery.
Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Nasher Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Sprengel Museum, Australian Centre for Photography, National Gallery of Canada, Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Heard Museum, and the Anchorage Museum, amongst others.
The gallery thanks the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC) for its financial support.
