Projects: Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill.

A Projects room at MoMA

From 25 April to 15 August 2021, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave a room in its Projects series to Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill. Projects is where the museum presents contemporary artists in small, focused shows, and 2021 marked the series' fiftieth year. The curator was Lucy Gallun.

Hill is a Métis artist, from one of Canada's Indigenous peoples, living and working in Vancouver. Her most constant material is tobacco.

Not tobacco as an image, but tobacco as matter: dried leaf, fresh leaf, shredded tobacco, tobacco flowers, tobacco-infused oil. In the MoMA room, almost everything contained it.

Flags, rabbits and spells

The room held two works from 2019, Dispersal and Disintegration: dried tobacco leaves sewn into flag-like patterns. Two kinds of leaf were used, Perique and Virginia.

The pairing is deliberate. Perique was originally grown by the Choctaw and Chickasaw. Virginia became the foundation of the American cigarette industry. One an Indigenous plant, the other a market plant. Sewing them into one flag sets two histories side by side, on a symbol made for claiming territory.

There were also soft rabbits made of pantyhose stuffed with shredded tobacco. The largest, Counterblaste, 2021, wears purple running shoes. Its name echoes an anti-tobacco treatise written by King James I of England in the early seventeenth century.

And there were eleven small paintings Hill calls spells, made with tobacco-infused Crisco oil, oil paint, magazine cutouts and tobacco flowers on paper. Their titles read like instructions: Spell #10, for unsticking. Spell #6, at the bus stop.

The wall that smells

Then the wall. One section of the gallery wall was rubbed with fresh tobacco leaves. No image. No text. Only leaves pressed against the surface until the smell sank in.

Visitors might not notice the wall at first. But they could smell it. A light, sweet smell, nothing like stale smoke in a bar or ash on a coat. Hill said she wanted the room to carry it as a reminder of the immaterial world, the unknown, and the still possible.

It was the one part of the room that could not be hung, stored or sold. It had no frame and no label of its own. It existed only as long as the smell stayed in the air.

Gift and commodity

For many Indigenous communities in North America, tobacco is a plant of ceremony and of giving. It is offered, gifted, returned. Colonial history turned that same plant into one of the most profitable commodities in the world.

The review in The Brooklyn Rail read Hill's room through those themes: colonialism, Indigenous gift economies, care work, reciprocity, sovereignty. Pantyhose, cooking oil and running shoes are things of daily life and daily care. Tobacco runs through all of them.

Set beside Massimo Bartolini's cigar smoking machine, two ways of seeing one plant appear. Bartolini meets tobacco as smoke, the smell of a street. Hill meets it before it burns, as a plant with a history and with owners.

Projects: Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill lasts because it lets a smell do what flags and words cannot. The smell of fresh leaf declares nothing. It only recalls that what we know as smoke was once a plant, grown on a piece of land, by particular people.