Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen
Hummingbird Guided Meditation
March 6—June 29, 2025
The first of a two-part journey representing one year in the life of a hummingbird as she migrates between Mexico and Canada, this footage was captured on Super8 film in an overgrown garden in Querétaro and then digitally slowed to embody the bird’s vastly different time signature and perception. Based on an inter-species empathic exchange with a migrating creature who does not recognize national borders but is affected by them, its seven scenes allude to the hummingbird’s occult exploitation in the crafting of love-binding spells, the worker-ants she feeds on, and the worker-humans that decimate her nesting grounds.
The accompanying soundtrack was composed from field recordings on cassette tape. Recorded over years and along the hummingbird's migratory path over North America, sources include the tolling of church bells, friends laughing, impulsive fireworks, freight trains, a rehearsing marching snare, and a coal mine bus tour. Physically looped and interpreted by artifact-prone equipment, the fluttering, murky electronics evoke a magnetic and instinctual world. From a perspective attenuated to the speed of beating wings, fragments of a second crystallize and blossom into blurred expanses.
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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.
