Fragile Harmonies
About Artwork
Type(s)
- Outdoor
- Public Art
- Temporary
- Urban Furniture
Fragile Harmonies is an exhibition curated by Wireframe, bringing together a selection of photographic self-portraits and poems by Meryl McMaster, a Canadian artist of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British, and Dutch ancestry based in Ottawa. Drawn from her poem What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth I & II, the exhibition’s title evokes the poetic tension that runs throughout her practice.
Informed by her Indigenous and European heritage, McMaster stages herself within landscapes imbued with memory, wearing sculptural costumes crafted from natural materials. These hybrid figures appear to emerge from the land as much as they inhabit it, carrying ancestral narratives and the traces left behind in places and collective imaginaries. Her photographs bring together the beauty of the landscape and the layered complexities of colonial history without attempting to resolve the tension between them.
The exhibition inhabits this in-between space, inviting viewers to consider harmony not as a fixed state but as a relationship in constant motion, one that must continually be reimagined and renewed. It opens a space for reflection on what connects us to the land, to inherited histories, and to the many forms of life that move through them.
Presented through the Bloom structures, Fragile Harmonies is available in a standard configuration consisting of five benches or three arches, as well as an extended configuration combining three arches and two benches, allowing the experience to be adapted to a wide range of urban, cultural, and institutional contexts.
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Artist(s)
Meryl McMaster
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 ContemporaryArt 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 EiteljorgMuseum, 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 ninecities 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.
McMaster is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto, Canada) and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Montréal, Canada).
