Halie Finney: The Ghosts Of The Mink Make A Big Spirit

Emerging artist Halie Finney, who grew up in Canyon Creek, on the southern shore of Lesser Slave Lake, uses her drawing-based practice to affirm her Métis heritage and her sense of connection to community and to place. Her 2019 work Ghost Dogs was installed on and in two cars of Edmonton’s LRT, and conjured up the spirits of beloved dogs of her farm childhood. Her current installation in the AGA’s Manning Hall twines together other childhood memories – the once- prosperous and then abandoned mink farms of her grandparents’ generation, the choking smoke of wildfires, the reassuring smoke of summer bonfires – to create an amorphous work of loss and life, danger and celebration.