Haley Bassett

In "Lineage", interdisciplinary artist Haley Bassett gives shape to the evolution of her artistic practice, examining it as a visual history that documents how her perception of time, place, memory, and identity have influenced her development as an artist and human being. Bassett’s work has long been inspired by her rural upbringing in the Peace Region, as well as her Métis and Eastern European ancestry, the combined histories of which have keenly informed her personhood and her practice. In this retrospective exhibition, she incorporates artworks, objects, keepsakes handed down generations, and recreations of domestic spaces that attempt to grasp at the otherwise intangible abstractions at the core of Bassett’s body of work.

The immateriality of memory and identity are at once solidified and complicated in this collection through mementos that evoke specific places and times, as a way of triggering remembrance while acknowledging its fallibility. Nostalgia hangs heavy from the walls, revealing how our homes are an inextricable extension of our selves. This exhibition traces an oeuvre that has evolved not only through the honing of skill, but also through a developing, fledgling sense of self and the fraught process of coming into one’s own as a young adult. In "Lineage", Bassett pulls back the curtains on her formative years to rediscover the hidden truths of how we come to be who we are.