Maria Hupfield

There is a striped, neon yellow doorway at the entrance of Maria Hupfield’s exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, a kind of portal into another realm. The single-room solo show, titled “The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan),” is visible through the gates but seems distant behind the architectural feature. Walking over the threshold, painted in a colour that has become synonymous with Hupfield’s performative and sculptural vocabulary for more than a decade, the audience feels a clear sense of transition. An immersive environment of sound, touch, sight and movement awaits in anticipation of activation, on the other side.

Adapted from her contribution to the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA), this newly configured installation by Hupfield is an institutional scale worthy of the artist’s conceptual and material ambitions. First and foremost is the subtle yet effective transformation of architects Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott’s iconic museum constructed in 1989, a postmodern geometric funhouse that plays on the overlapping grids of the city of Columbus and the later-built campus of Ohio State University. The interior of the Wexner Center reveals these intersecting topographical realities with gridded tiled floors, long perspectival hallways and other interweaving geometric volumes that constitute the various galleries. Hupfield astutely inserts herself into these lines by introducing her own architecture: a triangular marley dance floor softening the hardwood planks, walls painted 5% grey to gently shift the monotony of the traditionally white cube and a neon stage-like rectangular surface lying seemingly in wait, ready to be stepped on for a performance. These interventions, at times subtle yet always calculated and imbricated into the very identity of the building, give Hupfield’s work a strong construction to rest upon, one of her own design and making.

“The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan)” is a kinetic proposition meant to be engaged with. This is encouraged throughout the exhibition by didactics written in Hupfield’s own voice, which give a sense of her presence. Another example of this engagement is a neon yellow striped shelf jutting from the wall in the back right corner of the gallery. Here rests Touch: Pouch, Thunderbird, Heart, and Medicine Wheel, 2024, a series of four objects that can be manipulated, revealing the varying textures, jingles, densities, vibrations and weights proper to Hupfield’s holistic universe. These haptic moments allow the audience to understand the performative potential of other artworks, like the ceremonial-inspired objects on a nearby plinth that cannot be touched. Tin on tin jingling is a defining feature of Jingle Yoke: Maria, 2024, Jingle Epilette: Olivia, 2024, and Jingle Chest Plate: SA, 2024, which were all worn and played in a collaborative performance with the multi-instrumentalist artist SA Smythe and saxophonist Olivia Shortt at the TBA in 2024. A 14-minute video at the front of the gallery, projected so that the performers appear larger than life, documents and relays this original action. The visual, acoustic and spatial relationship between the jingle garments and the documentation creates a bridge between the live and the replayed, the here and there.

This endless return, this spiral or whirlpool, which is both a narrative and sensorial structure in Hupfield’s work, asks viewers to think of the museum and these displayed performance artifacts as more than the sum of their parts. For the Anishinaabe artist of the Wasauksing First Nation, the story of the Fabulous Panther offers insight into how we might approach art and artifacts of all kinds as active and dynamic, rather than a relic of colonial curiosity or a hollow entity devoid of its actual use and life force. “In the stories of the Fabulous Panther, the spiral emerges from the surface of the water; it’s a whirlpool that you don’t want to get caught in,” Hupfield offers as an open reflection in one of the wall texts. “A spiral is a circle, but it doesn’t return to its origin of departure. It doesn’t close; it continues. A cut felt spiral can be rolled up and, suddenly, it changes form. Like a seashell. Like hair on the crown of a child’s head. We know spirals.” On the centrally located elevated platform, these spirals take on a material life in beautifully crafted felt sculptures lined with silver jingles. Three of the four pieces are coiled on small, plastic, wheeled plinths, while one of the pieces is unwound, pulled towards the sky by a taut rope-and-pulley system tied on a nearby column. The kinetic tension in this dynamic arrangement is palpable, and, true to herself, Hupfield imbues the inanimate with a sense of being and becoming.

Throughout “The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan),” Hupfield draws and redraws borders, yet she also brings attention to their fluidity and movability. In a cartel associated with photographic documentation of TBA 2024, Hupfield reflects on the connective tissue between Toronto and Columbus: “In Toronto on Lake Ontario, hidden in the urban cityscape, there are these huge ravine waterway systems, there’s this gorgeous sky. Here in Columbus, Ohio, there are two glorious rivers. How can I bring life and energy into the exhibition space and be excited about it?” Just weeks into the second Trump administration, and with the annexation of sovereign governments like Canada, Greenland and Panama a common currency in the news cycle, it is impossible not to think of the underlying colonial, imperial and genocidal legacies that have already carved Indigenous peoples from their lands for centuries. The huge waterways and glorious rivers Hupfield speaks of, spiralling currents pulsating energy underneath the city, are a reminder to avoid knee-jerk, jingoistic responses to Trump’s threats that might otherwise reinforce settler colonial mentalities of land possession, strict border definitions and nationalist natural resource-hoarding defences. Instead, like the aptly titled photography series “Truth Comes In Its Own Time,” 2007–2018, which is also on display in the exhibition, showing the artist in soaking wet dress-clothes on the edge of a fountain in Vancouver, accompanied by felt cut-outs acting like sibling-entities, Hupfield asks us to slow down and take stock. “I, too, am water,” says Hupfield in a wall text, “and am in a relationship of humility with it in a reciprocal balance.” ❚

“The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan)” was exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, from February 7, 2025, to June 29, 2025.

Didier Morelli is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Art History at Concordia University and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He holds a PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University (Chicago, IL). He is the curator of MANIF 12, the 2026 Quebec City Biennial, titled “Briser la glace/Splitting Ice.”