In Plains Air marks Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire’s first museum solo exhibition in Canada, presenting new work shaped by her time on her ancestral territories in Treaty 6. In the bush, the boundaries between inside and outside fall away—the land is home, shelter, and teacher. Cire turns to this context to rethink Western plein-air painting, reframing it through Cree worldviews in which living, making, and being on the land are inseparable.
For this exhibition, she transforms painting into a deeply material and relational practice. A central sculptural installation—an expansive trapline house wall built from painted, unstretched canvas—evokes both the stability of a family home and the openness of life lived with the land. Surrounding works use earth pigments, folded and stitched canvas, beaded lines, and provisional wooden structures to explore how stories seep into materials rather than sit on their surfaces.
By drawing on Cree linguistic structures, ancestral knowledge, and memories of trapline life, Cardinal Cire resists colonial binaries that divide indoor from outdoor, art from living, and abstraction from the embodied. Unfolding as a constellation of materials and gestures, the exhibition loosens painting from fixed categories and signifiers, allowing the work to both carry and transform knowledge.
Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire is a visual artist born and raised on Treaty 6 territory of central Alberta. Cire’s work talks with the culture that raised her: her kokom’s lineage of Beaver Lake Cree Nation and her moshom’s Métis lineage. These conversations oscillate between the terrains of paint, beads and textiles, focusing on place and enlivening material associations. Here, relations speak about language and memory, where it can be found, and what it says when it reaches.
Cire completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with a minor in Curatorial Studies from Emily Carr University. Cire graduated in 2024 from Yale University with a MFA in Painting and Printmaking where she won the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Fazakas (Vancouver) the Native American Cultural Center (New Haven), Art Toronto, Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), Burnaby Art Gallery (Burnaby), Seymour Art Gallery (North Vancouver), HOEA Gallery (Gisborne, NZ), David Castillo (Miami) and Franz Kaka (Toronto).