McCord Museum 2019: Hannah Claus

there’s a reason for our connection

Dialogue and Encounter

Artist-in-Residence Program Exibition

6th Edition

March 7 - August 11, 2019

For the 6^th year of its Artist-in-Residence program, the Montreal's McCord Museum presents an exhibition by a multidisciplinary visual artist Hannah Claus who has Mohawk and English ancestry. Claus draws inspiration both from the McCord’s Indigenous Cultures permanent collection and the Text Archives. Her work portrays the concepts of dialogue and encounter, which are a cornerstone of what she refers to as relationality, further identifying it as “a principle that is at the heart of Indigenous cultures ".

The works on display are all new artistic pieces created specifically for this exhibition. They are presented together with museum’s object that inspired them, thus conjuring up the invisible encounters and exchanges across historical eras that are part of our shared histories. This also bringing into focus several artefacts from McCord’s large collection.

There are works that focus on writing and communication, others evoke temporality through repetitive imagery and translucent media. Claus uses these concepts to evoke what is not necessarily visible at first glance, but what the visitor might perceive or even feel on viewing her works.

“Culture is alive. It’s fascinating to draw inspiration from objects and to bring them to life, to make them live and breathe a little,” she states.

She further states about her work:

 “I use installations to create sensory environments that speak to memory and transformation. My works explore the relationships between the specific, the personal and the real, which lie at the heart of an Indigenous cosmogony—often the world view of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), in particular—in order to question our perception of time, space and memory… What I want to do is create a dialogue between present and past.”  

About Hannah Claus

Hannah Claus, a visual artist of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and English ancestry, has been living and working in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) since 2001. In her installations, she explores our connections with memory, space and time; she often works in collaboration with other artists, using processes of repetition and accumulation to express an Indigenous method and perspective. A graduate of the University of Ottawa (1992), the Ontario College of Art and Design (1998) and Concordia University (MVA, 2004), she has exhibited her works in numerous arts centres and public museums across Canada, as well as in Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, Chile and the United States. Hannah Claus is a member of the Tyendinaga Mohawk community of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario.

Hannah Claus

Hannah Claus

Artist-in-Residence program

The McCord Museum’s Artist-in-Residence program invites artists from Montreal and elsewhere to explore and interact with the museum’s collections, casting a critical and conceptual eye and relating them to their own artistic practices. Through the works they create, artists in residence revisit the social and historical facets of artefacts in the McCord’s collections and address how they help construct our identity as Montrealers and as a society.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All images @ Nadia Slejskova

For more information, visit the McCord Museum website.