CCAM MIX: ground || horizons – Maria Hupfield

CCAM MIX (Moving Image Exterior) exhibits moving images across the façade of 149 York Street, as well as inside our Leeds Studio. At the confluence of art, architecture, and public space, the system invites passersby to pause, see everyday surroundings in new ways, and enter the building to join us in our studios.

ground || horizons

In Spring 2026, CCAM MIX is being activated with ground || horizons, a project by Guest Art Directors Tusia Dabrowska and Wiktor Freifeld (MFA, Design – Projections, David Geffen School of Drama, 2026). From mid-January to mid-April, works by invited artists working in 3D environments, live performance, etc. will be presented, created or adapted for CCAM MIX. CCAM will also hold an open call for Yale community members to present work from April 13–26. Apply to the open call here.

The next invited artist in the series is Maria Hupfield. Małgorzata's work Gestures. Figures. Signs. will be exhibited this and next Friday and Saturday from 5–8pm. Stop by 149 York Street—or stay for a while!

About the Artist

Based in Toronto, Maria Hupfield is an off-reservation member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. She merges performance art, design, and sculpture, drawing from Indigenous storytelling traditions through visual art, scholarship and ethical practices. Her work on fabulous panther was featured in a solo at the Wexner Center for Arts in Ohio, 2025. She is a recent recipient of the 2025 Ontario Arts Council Indigenous Artist Laureate, 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, and was the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residence with the City of Toronto 2024. Her work has been exhibited, performed, and collected across North America. Hupfield is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Digital Arts and Performance, DVS / English & Drama, and a Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto where she is the Director / Lead Artist of the Indigenous Creation Studio.

From the Artist

"The studio is where I return to when I need to regenerate. I view my performances as a form of choreography between artist, collaborators, audience, and gallery, with art objects becoming alive as active participants, layered with meaning and relationality. For ground || horizons, I invite the public into my studio,where they witness me as a performance artist moving with a jingle spiral through a private nonlinear narrative recorded on my iPhone.

Art and the act of creation is a form of medicine and has provided me with decades of personal self-reflection and well-being. Since 2010, I have worked with industrial felt and jingles as my primary materials. My close relationship with jingles helps me navigate my life. I often work sculpturally in mid tone grey felt with vibrant shocks of colour accents. The neutrality of grey provides a comforting and expansive surface that I can manipulate to bring meaning on my own terms: I sculpt, slice, cut, design, stitch, embellish by hand, and activate or wear it in live performances. For example, Jingle Spiral (2025) consists of a hand-cut spiral in gray industrial felt, the edges trimmed with tin cones customarily found on Anishnaabe women’s contemporary dress (in ceremony and powwow dance). When rolled, suspended, or draped on the body in live performances, the spiral moves beyond the aesthetics of art history and native fetish to be re-coded with new meaning: the spiral is sacred geometry, depicting the lower world and embodying sound in a non gendered, expansive retelling of water, creation, balance, renewal and wellbeing, as in my recent exhibition The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (2025, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio)."

Pictured: Still from work by Maria Hupfield, 2026, CCAM MIX (Moving Image Exterior), Yale CCAM, 149 York Street. Photo by Wiktor Freifeld.