Curated by Oceana Masterman-Smith and Verity Seward, with the support of The Baldwin Gallery, IKON Gallery and the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom, Meryl McMaster will open at Canada House, March 2020.

Meryl McMaster: As Immense As The Sky 

Meryl McMaster is a Canadian artist, living and working in Ottawa. She describes her work as sculptural photography — incorporating props, constructed garments and performance to examine her sense of identity and selfhood. McMaster has dual heritage and is Nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and a member of the Siksika First Nation on her father’s side and has British, Dutch and Scottish ancestry on her mother’s side. For her latest series, As Immense as the Sky (2019), McMaster set out to gather the wisdom and folklore of relatives on both sides of her heritage. She traveled to sites of ancestral significance across Canada following waterways and ancient pitching trails where social, cultural and environmental histories have collided. Her self-portraits reanimate mythology and family anecdotes through her own personally transformative journey through the landscape. The series draws upon themes of memory, migration, genealogy and time as McMaster retraces the footsteps of her ancestors. Her images explore the intersections of both her Indigenous and European heritage whilst revealing Canada’s conflicted colonial legacies. McMaster is represented in London by The Baldwin Gallery, in Toronto by the Stephen Bulger Gallery and in Montréal by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain.