Holly Aubichon: Urban Legends

Guest curated by Tomas Jonsson

This exhibition runs June 14 - October 12, 2025, at Dunlop Art Gallery (Sherwood Village branch)

Urban Legends honours Holly Aubichon’s relatives, growing up in Canada’s violent, forceful attempt to assimilate Indigenous people. In these works, Holly pieces together stories of relatives, symbolically recovering and restoring them to her circle.

Due to their weight, these stories come in glimpses; short conversations or a passing memory shared on the road. Holly has collected these fragments and reimagined them through her paintings, removing colonial filters and restoring the stories in a way to build a better understanding and connection.

Art is healing, a way to document and preserve her paternal lineage while placing herself as the leading matriarch within these painted narratives. Her paintings depict intimate urban interiors, where individuals do their best to continue traditional ways while adapting to contemporary urban realities.

Holly's family had to be tough, living in both worlds of figuring out how to cope in the city, and with the effects of residential schools: homelessness, prostitution and addiction. Her paintings reimagine their stories of suffering and loss to envision what stories they might have shared with memories of joy, accomplishment, and moments in ceremony.

Holly Aubichon investigates topics of urban Indigeneity and how ancestral knowledge is carried through to urban spaces using memory recollection, the land, and body through forms of painting, writing, tattooing and curation. Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, her Indigenous relations come from Green Lake region, SK and Lestock, SK. Aubichon’s practice is laboriously reliant on retracing familial memories and connections. She uses painting as a way to foster personal healing. As an extension of her practice, she has begun a traditional Indigenous tattoo mentorship to acknowledge the memories that bodies hold, support the healing, grieving and the revival of traditional tattoo practices. She graduated from the University of Regina in the Spring of 2021 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, minoring in Indigenous Art History. Aubichon is the 2021 BMO 1st Art! Regional winner for Saskatchewan.

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