Breanna Sprecker

Blood Memory

Opening Friday September 5 at 7:00 pm
Show runs September 6-21, 11-4 pm

Blood Memory (there is a place in the body where no blood flows) is a collection of work exploring themes of complex grief and intergenerational trauma. It weaves together family narratives, visual metaphors, and distinct cultural references through animal symbology and poetry. This culmination of paintings, sculptures, and text-based work expands on ideas and imagery from its source material of vulnerable poetry written about the tragic death of Breanna’s estranged mother, of whom she gets her Indigenous heritage. Blood memory is the concept of the body/blood holding trauma caused by cultural genocide and the continuation of colonial violence passed down matrilineally, all that we inherit from our mother, both beautiful and painful. It exists in a space between body and spirit. Blood Memory confronts grief, family lines, and loss of personal and cultural histories, it seeks to decolonize processes of grief and collective loss. Sprecker unpacks the personal loss of her mother, but also the collective experience of many Indigenous contemporaries, as a third-generation residential school survivor and the daughter of a sixties-scoop survivor, she seeks to tell stories of Blackfoot resilience and personal healing.

About the Artist

Breanna Sprecker is a multidisciplinary artist of Blackfoot (Siksikatapii) and Mixed European Heritage. She grew up in the Okanagan Valley. She recently graduated from the UVIC BFA program with Honours, majoring in visual art. She has received the JCURA Research grant and participated in various student exhibitions in the UVIC Audain Gallery and the Audain Studio Seminar. She is drawn to large-scale painting, mixed media sculpture, collage, and text-based work. Her practice often focuses on themes of displaced identity, family, cultural resurgence, intergenerational trauma, and social and environmental justice. Spreckers’ work explores themes of complex grief and family structures. What we inherit and what we pass on. It weaves together family narratives, visual metaphors, and distinct cultural references through animal symbology and poetry. She explores these themes through animal symbology. Crows, Buffalo, Rez Dogs, Rabbits, and other symbols act as an extension of herself and her ancestral, maternal line. She uses art to process personal and collective experiences through poetry, visual metaphor, and embracing pain and life experience as artistic research. Breanna uses vulnerability, exploration of text, cultural learning, and decolonial world views to build her visual language and creative practice.