Author’s Note: This review is based on a past exhibition at Harcourt House from October 14-November 26, 2022.
Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet’s paintings about memory are dreamlike, with elements of striking detail and swaths of “unfinished” fields in each. The colours and painted sections are rough but controlled, sometimes thick, other times dripping. Layers of colours seem to glow, and Ligtvoet adds subtle textual elements, graphite lines, and Easter eggs across paintings. She uses her formal training to compose each painting, but her real audience is her family. She gathers stories of her family, and in turn, her art gathers stories for her family.
Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet’s multidisciplinary art practice is based on her family’s stories and experiences of growing up on her family farm on land scrip that was previously part of the Michel reserve before enfranchisement.
Ligtvoet is based in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan (Edmonton). She is Cree and Métis descending from Michel First Nation, as well as Dutch and mixed European. She grew up on the traditional land of Michel First Nation, which significantly impacts her practice. She graduated from MacEwan in 2017, and completed her BFA at the University of Alberta in 2021. Ligtvoet is not the only storyteller in her family - her moshom regularly told stories, one of Ligtvoet’s exhibitions was based on a poem her mom wrote at her age, and Ligtvoet’s current and upcoming works involve painting with her mom.
You can see her love for the land and her family when she talks. The farm has multiple generations of lived experience and history, and Ligtvoet says she’s always learning new stories. She’s careful to consider what to keep private, because these are family stories and stories about real people. She navigates these boundaries in a very organic way, by having conversations and collaborating with family members. Her practice is ongoing, and she keeps adding to it. Her process is different every time, but she’ll sit with ideas, do research, look at reference photos, do sketches, and then sit with the canvas.
Ligtvoet is more interested in the language, words, and the lived experience of her family than what colonial archives have to offer alone. She uses maps from her mom’s collection, and gathers local knowledge from people in her community. She describes her main research process as “kitchen table talk,” where they sit at the table, eat pickled garlic, and have nonlinear conversations about what they want to share.
Ligtvoet is a recent graduate but hit the ground running, and 2022 has been her year to thrive! She was a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Emerging Artist Award in June. She co-founded Making Space with one of her favourite artists and collaborators, Sanaa Humayun. In October, she published her first graphic novel with Conundrum Press, We Were Younger Once, which rose to the top of local book sales! She’s had local shows recently at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, Latitude 53, and most recently, at Harcourt House from October 14- November 26, 2022.
At Harcourt House, Ligtvoet’s exhibition you’ll always know displayed seven modest-size acrylic paintings on canvas (approximately 24” x 36”). One wall had the title and a single painting of a young Kiona and moshom looking at mint.
Another wall had three matching paintings of early winter scenes at the farm. One with a couple of young people hugging, one with two people sitting by a treeline with a hunting rifle, and one of a young woman in a black parka standing near a shed. Two paintings have someone with a red coat and mint-green hat, and the woman in the black parka seems to be wearing the same hat. Each of these paintings has a single word in translucent white mirror text at the top: “STAY,” “BURY,” and “STILL.”
The third wall was much warmer, and has three paintings of elders. The centre painting, titled Edith, shows a woman in a wheelchair holding someone’s hand, but the body attached to the hand seems to fade or disappear into the background. The painting to the left of Edith looks like a close-up study of their hands. The shirt of the unidentified man matches the shirt in the first painting with Kiona and moshom. The dark painting to the right seems like the odd one out, featuring a campfire scene where the fire glows in the dark and a person is walking forward away from the campfire. There’s also an odd blue horse thing, which is familiar when you look to the right of the door at the first set of paintings. The left-most winter painting has the same spectral blue horse in it.
Several characters and colours reoccur between paintings, which cultivates a feeling of comfort and familiarity. Other recurring things to look for are Ligtvoet’s handwriting elements, and her lovely signature sketched pattern of flowers or leaves, based on brambles by the treeline.
I could see the influence of graphic novels in this exhibition. It was fun to go back and forth between the paintings, stand away and then look close. The paintings have nonlinear conversations with each other, just as the subjects did.
Her graphic novel We Were Younger Once has similar bramble patterns, subject matter, and open space on each page, but it has more explanatory text. The main characters are identified as moshom, her mother, her brother, her cousin, and herself.
As she creates this universe in which she shares these stories, Ligtvoet is careful to acknowledge her perspective’s impact on the story. She does not own her family story, but she is happy to share it.
Her work teaches me that memory is collaborative. Instead of relying on one perspective or even one medium to inform her work, she forms stories by correlating or layering experiences between people over time. She allows the process and the hand of the artist to show through the finished pieces. Like memories, parts have sharp detail while other parts are fuzzy, incomplete, and prone to revision.
Her approach to memory and her approach to art is delightfully consistent. My favourite art shows the hand of the artist and the process of creating the work, and Ligtvoet has a similar ethos. It’s hard to know when a piece is finished but somehow she knows. At the end of our conversation, she smiled and said, “I like to leave projects on a really open-ended note.”