Maria Hupfield’s Vessels of Communion

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 249, ‘Object Lessons’

Though static in nature, Maria Hupfield’s sculptures are kinetic in spirit. The mesh jerseys, boxing gloves and whistles that appear in her exhibitions give the impression of equipment used in high-intensity circuit training. Most sculpture used in performance art struggles to cast aside the designation of stage prop but, as Hupfield noted in the catalogue The One Who Keeps On Giving (2017): ‘I sometimes think the object is the excuse for the interaction.’ As both agents and tools, Hupfield’s sculptures often rest between sets on display structures built from lumber beams and plywood, with high-visibility bands of tape and paint signalling attention and demarcating potential hazards in a space of active construction.

Survival and Other Acts of Defiance (2012) is an installation that includes one of Hupfield’s early performances for the camera, in which she jumps on the spot while wearing Jingle Boots (2011). The felt footwear evokes jingle dress regalia, but Hupfield’s garment is an artistic innovation. As her feet come in and out of contact with the ground, the tin cones pulse, her body becoming an instrument. She appears powerful as the minutes elapse, never tiring in the video, which is looped with a seamless cut. Her beating heart, the work suggests, is defiant.

Hupfield is an Anishinaabe citizen of Wasauksing First Nation. When she made Survival and Other Acts of Defiance, to be alive and Indigenous in Canada was itself an affront to a colonial government trying repeatedly to extinguish their rights. This was most apparent at the time through Bill C-45, which proposed changes to the Indian Act and environmental protections, against which the Idle No More movement coalesced. In Survival, Hupfield’s landing spot is indicated by an X that appears in aluminium tape below the screen on the floor of the exhibition space. The marking resembles both a spike used on a theatre stage and, significantly, a symbol from treaty negotiations. X-marks, even when forced and unequal, were counted as signatures of consent on binding agreements about land – the most basic terms of which require routine defending to this day.

In her sculptural practice, Hupfield has deployed industrial felt to make replicas of everything from Walkmans and sunglasses (Traveling Bag, 2012) to canoes (Jiimaan, 2015). Wool first arrived in Anishinaabe territory in the 17th century during the fur trade and was quickly adopted into local textile production, a context foregrounded in curator Sherry Farrell Racette’s ‘Manidoowegin’ (2019), a solo exhibition of Hupfield’s work at Diagonale, Montréal. By the middle of the 20th century, felt had become a tool of post-minimalism widely associated with Robert Morris’s anti-form sculptures and Joseph Beuys’s fluxus actions.

Hupfield handles these precedents in ways that steady the imbalances of weight and power through redistribution. Her use of felt turns any object, no matter how singular, into a generic form. This alters its function and how a person might relate to it. Felt is a technical fabric engineered to cushion shock and dampen sound and, while Hupfield makes use of these applications, she also plays with the antagonism of the material: a ladder-back chair becomes floppy; a musical device muted. There is an element of resistance that the artist manipulates into a healthy tension.

‘Objects are tied to moments in time,’ Hupfield observed in The One Who Keeps On Giving. Vessels of shared experience, they ‘link us as participants to other places, people, experiences and memories’. Hupfield’s practice establishes a network of artists, including those memorialized in her work. In Untitled (After Luna) (2024), a black T-shirt emblazoned with profanities echoes the wardrobe of the late James Luna, an artist whose own sculptural enterprising made use of everything from crutches to exercise bikes. Fire Starter (Native New Yorker) (2024) features an inside-out, raw-edge, ribboned tank top on which the name of artist and curator Lloyd Oxendine appears in blocky felt lettering. The clothing was previously used in Hupfield’s sculpture Native New Yorker (2015) and later worn during her performance Total Synchronization (2023), for the exhibition ‘Indian Theater’ staged at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson.

Wearable designs are a mainstay of Hupfield’s practice, which, in spring 2024, expanded through the launch of her clothing collection, ‘Mashkiki is Movement’, at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Native Fashion Week in Santa Fe. Three of the garments in the line are bandolier bags or aazhooningwa’igan, a word that translates to ‘worn across the shoulder’. In its Anishinaabemowin name, action is inherent. Likewise, as demonstrated in Hupfield’s work, forms are realized through relationships.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘Mend and Repair’

Maria Hupfield’s ‘The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan)’ is on view at Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, until 29 June

^{Main image: Maria Hupfield, Total Synchronization (detail), 2023, performance documentation, ‘Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969’. Courtesy: the artist and Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson; photograph: Jonathan Asiedu}