Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen
Hummingbird Guided Meditation
March 6—June 29, 2025
Hummingbird Guided Meditation is a cinematic installation presented as a series of meditations on life from the perspective of a hummingbird. The film’s seven scenes correlate to moments along the hummingbird’s yearly migratory ellipse. Super8 footage captured in an overgrown garden in Querétaro, Mexico and slowed to embody the hummingbird’s experience of time and space, opens a channel for speculative empathic exchange between species. From a perspective attenuated to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize and blossom into blurred expanses.
Hummingbird Guided Meditation’s accompanying soundtrack is composed from field recordings on cassette tape captured over years and along the hummingbird's migratory path. Sources include the tolling of church bells, friends laughing, freight trains, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Departing from the entanglements of field recording with New Age music and hobby naturalism, the sound is haunted and ambiguous, rarely resolving. Manually looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the murky, fluttering electronics evoke a magnetic and instinctual world.
Engaging with its namesake methodology, Hummingbird Guided Meditation both creates and problematizes an interspecies imaginary, implicating us through its bejewelled and intoxicating veil.
The digitized Super8 film by Miruna Drăgan was previously exhibited on a small monitor without sound at Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2021 and as a single-channel projection with sound by Maggie Tiesenhausen at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro in Mexico in 2022.
This iteration expands into a multi-channel projected installation with spatialized sound and a hummingbird narrator. The words of the hummingbird were written by Marianne Shaneen and voiced by Paulina Macías.
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About the Artists
Miruna Drăgan
(she/her)
Miruna Drăgan lives alongside Akokiniskway (the Rosebud River) and teaches in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) on Treaty 7 territory. With an intuitive approach, her work responds to observed synchronicities through a broad range of methods and materials, toward a subjective reimagining of archetypal myths and landscapes. Drăgan’s works come through in dreams or visions, reflecting themes of dispersion and transcendence, both as individual pieces and collectively within immersive environments, while offering themselves as new tools for divination or metaphysics. Recent exhibition venues include Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto (2023), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and Museo Regional de Querétaro (2022), Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2021), and Living Art Museum in Reykjavík (2019). Drăgan’s work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Arts Development, and the Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts).
Maggie Tiesenhausen
(they/them)
Maggie Tiesenhausen is a northwest Albertan settler music producer and artist. Their auditory works present insurgent, speculative imaginaries, and rural cinema-verité in a complex balance. The sometimes-disparate elements in interplay—found sound, field recordings, barely-audible confessions, amplified noise floor, accidental recordings, amateur performance—bring clouded internal sites into view. Often emotionally charged, atmospheric, and unresolved, these aural worlds summon a cinematic visuality. Tiesenhausen lives in Treaty 8 territory, in the unincorporated hamlet of Demmitt, Alberta. They also share a collaborative singing practice with artist and musician Jen Reimer called Tunnel.
