Nadia Myre

“Once, when crossing the border into the United States, I was required to prove that more than 50% of my blood is Native American. What resulted is an artistic questioning of identity as defined by blood. Each bead in my series Meditations on Red represents at once a drop of white or red blood and a hybrid identity as ‘white’ or ‘red.’” 

The enlarged print of Nadia Myre’s hand-beaded piece magnifies the scale of a traditional object and encourages a series of associations, from the mandala to throat pieces of wampum armour. In this series, her creative gesture takes note of a tradition and preserves an ancestral know-how: the art of beading, made contemporary. There is thus a relation to be drawn between historical and mythical consciousness, the future and the past, the modern and the traditional, the centre and the periphery.

– Nadia Myre