Artist
Cheryl L’Hirondelle

Metis/Cree Nation / Canada
www.cheryllhirondelle.com

Cheryl L’Hirondelle is an Alberta-born, Metis/Cree, interdisciplinary artist and singer/songwriter. Since the early 1980s, L’Hirondelle has created, performed and presented work in a variety of artistic disciplines, including music, performance art, theatre, performance poetry, storytelling, installation, and new media. Her creative practice investigates a Cree worldview (nêhiyawin) in contemporary time-space. L’Hirondelle develops endurance-based performances, interventions, site-specific installations, interactive net.art projects, and keeps singing, making rhythm, songs, dancing, and telling stories whenever and wherever she can. She has performed and exhibited her work widely both in Canada and abroad, and her previous musical efforts and new media work have garnered her critical acclaim and numerous awards.

Performance
êkâya-pâhkaci by Cheryl L’Hirondelle

êkâya-pâhkaci [ee-guy-uh-puck-a-chee] (don’t freeze up)

êkâya-pâhkaci operates through an intersection of nomadic site-specificity, visual patterning, language, narrative, movement and rhythm. In this work the artist stages a performance presented under an adaptable traveling tent from where she relates and offers information to the audience using her body, voice and graffiti/tagging. The audience, by proximity and in accepting her invitation to witness her activities “comes in from the cold” and becomes part of her “camp.”

Presented in the context of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Art Festival

Faculty of Art Speaker’s Series: An Evening with Cheryl L’Hirondelle
October 15, 2008 @ 6:00pm
Ontario College of Art & Design, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer