Audie Murray and Zoe Cire: Firestarters: Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver, BC

Opening reception
Saturday, May 31, 2 - 4 pm

659 East Hastings Street

Firestarters brings together artists Audie Murray and Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire, whose practices converge through abstraction, delineation, and archival processes. Through material investigations, the exhibition observes fire as both metaphor and matter-an agent of transformation that touches land, language, kinship, and memory.

The exhibition considers fire not just as destruction, but as a generative force. Exploring the multidimensional nature of memory, the artists create space for nuance, holding both the intangible and tangible impacts of time and place. In this spirit, Firestarters honours the slow burn of care and the spark of transformation.

Audie Murray presents four new drawings made with bison bone black pigment and matchsticks as mark-makers, exploring celestial grids and the internal structures of bead weavings. Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire offers paintings on firewood and cast iron pans, where domestic surfaces become sites of concealment and revelation. Her work reconfigures the ordinary as charged with layered histories. 

Audie Murray (b. 1993) is a Cree-Métis artist who works with a multitude of mediums, such as sculpture, media, beadwork, and drawing, and often uses found objects from daily life in her work. Her practice is informed by the process of making and visiting to explore themes of contemporary culture, embodied experiences, and lived dualities. These modes of working assist with the recentering of our collective connection to bodies, ancestral knowledge systems, and relationality. Murray completed a Diploma in Visual Arts at Camosun College in 2016, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Regina in 2017. In 2022, she completed her MFA at the University of Calgary. Murray is from the Lebret and Meadow Lake communities located on Treaty 4 & 6 territories and is currently based in Oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan).

Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire (b. 1998, Ponoka, Alberta) is a visual artist born and raised on Treaty 6 territory of central Alberta who brings together material sensibilities from her paternal Métis and maternal Beaver Lake Cree Nation lineages. Her works engage conversations which oscillate between the terrains of paint, beads and textiles, focusing on place and enlivening material associations. Cire holds a  Bachelor of Visual Arts from Emily Carr University (Vancouver), and Master of Fine Art from Yale University (USA) where she received the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize. Her works have been presented in exhibitions at the Native American Cultural Center (New Haven), Burnaby Art Gallery (British Columbia), Seymour Art Gallery (North Vancouver), HOEA Gallery (Gisborne, NZ), David Castillo (Miami) and Franz Kaka (Toronto).