Firestarters crackles with work by Indigenous artists who defy categorization, at Fazakas Gallery to July 26

Audie Murray and Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire wield everything from glass beads to firewood and cast-iron pans in an exhibit that ignites new ways of seeing

By Janet Smith

Audie Murray and Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire’s Buds, 2025.

Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire’s Cracklings 8, 2025

Firestarters is at Fazakas Gallery to July 26

FEATURING WORKS FROM PAINTINGS ON firewood to imagery made with bison-bone black pigment and matchsticks, a new exhibition at Fazakas Gallery lives up to its name, Firestarters—a title that suggests flames not as a destructive force but as a way to ignite new ideas and blaze paths forward.

The show brings together two artists who are part of a rising wave of Indigenous artists resisting categorization. Métis artist Audie Murray comes from the Lebret and Meadow Lake communities on Treaty 4 and 6 territories, and has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Regina and a master’s of fine art from the University of Calgary. Cree-Métis artist Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire, who hails from the Treaty 6 territory of central Alberta, holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Emily Carr University.of Art + Design and an MFA from Yale University.

Both work in a wide variety of media and integrate traditional forms like beading in fresh, and often thought-provoking, ways.

Audie Murray’s The Stars in Our Bones, 2025.

Cire paints images and portraits on both roughly axed firewood and the kind of cast-iron pans you might throw on an open flame, charging ordinary surfaces with layered histories and memories. Warmth and resilience burn bright here, whether it’s a joyful Cracklings 3 (Self-Portrait in Winter), with the artist smiling in a toque and furry-collared coat on a firelog, or Always Been Like This, A Warm Glow, featuring a child nuzzling into a laughing woman, created in oil, beadwork, and fabric on canvas. Some pieces, such as the firewood grouping Cracklings 8, with its glowing neon ATM sign, refer to the urban-Indigenous experience. And make sure to check out her “Hankburgers”, conjured with a hank of beads patty on two wood buns, slathered with acrylic condiments—echoing some of the symbolism of Consume.

Murray, meanwhile, suggests the celestial in ghostly abstract works like The Stars in Our Bones, rendered in bison-bone pigment on watercolour paper. Consume, meanwhile, features an enticing, picture-perfect white cake, conjured in glass seed beads and decorated with red caribou hair tufting and bead “sprinkles”. It sits atop an old-fashioned glass cake stand—placed on a pedestal, inedible, and questioning colonial-stoked consumerism, complicated by its materials.

There is much more to discover in this exhibit where materials and ideas crackle and spark.  

Audie Murray’s Consume, 2024.

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