Above a busy street, Maria-Margaretta's Aansaamb reaches into rich Métis heritage
Spanning the side of a downtown building as part of this year’s Capture Photography Festival, the installation radiates Indigenous knowledge and Prairie warmth
The photograph at the heart of Maria-Margaretta’s 2025 installation Aansaamb.
Capture Photography Festival presents Aansaamb at the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation from April 1, 2025, to March 1, 2026
THIS SPRING, A MEMORY-CHARGED photo installation by Métis artist Maria-Margaretta will contrast a busy downtown thoroughfare with an invitation to take pause.
Titled Aansaamb, a Michif word, the photograph commissioned by the Capture Photography Festival is mounted overhead on the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation on Burrard Street, and is the artist’s largest public work to date.
“I wanted to put something forward that would make people stop, and kind of act as a portal,” Margaretta, who grew up in Saskatoon on Treaty 6 territory, tells Stir. “To give them a brief moment in the busyness and to be transported to the Prairies, or a moment with their own child, or from their own childhood.”
Pictured is an infant-sized flannel shirt stitched with Métis floral beadwork, the first piece of regalia Margaretta beaded for her daughter. The shirt is wrapped around a stone ax head. “I had been gifted a stone ax head from my dad, and after she had outgrown this garment, and I ended up, at one point, just wrapping it around the rock for transportation,” Margaretta explains. “So the pieces kind of ended up being bundled together.”
On an annual road trip through Saskatchewan, and on her way back from an art residency in Winnipeg, Margaretta stopped near St. Louis, Saskatchewan, where her Métis family is from, and sat by the riverbank with her daughter to eat. She happened to have the beaded shirt and ax head in the car at the time.
“I pulled it out and was showing her, and was thinking about that piece being on that land, and then she reached out and grabbed for it,” Margaretta says. “And I just thought, ‘Wow, this would be a beautiful documentation in itself, the gesture of her reaching for the beads and reaching for the land.’”
Margaretta says this photograph wasn’t the piece she originally planned to put forward for the Capture Festival, “but then this just ended up being so beautiful, with that very intimate gesture of her reaching for the beadwork.”
The artist explains that when her dad gave her the ax head, he felt it was a representation of passing on knowledge and passing on culture, which is central to her own artistic practice. While much of Margaretta’s work is focused on beadwork and textiles, her foray into photography is relatively new to her practice, and stems from that same interest in documentation, creating cultural archives, and passing them on to future generations. “Sometimes, I call it my Michif archive or my familiar archive,” she says.
In recent years, Margaretta’s work has evolved to explore her role as a mother, in addition to her deep connection to her ancestry. “Family and community are very strong reoccurring theme in my work, so when I got pregnant and had my daughter, it just naturally kind of flowed.”
The beaded shirt central to Aansaamb is part of a series of gifts Margaretta has made for her daughter. “I think that for Michif people, art and parenting are not separate. Life and art, they aren’t separate. I would say that Michif parenting and motherhood are just an integral part of my practice in general.”
For Margaretta, titling works in Michif is a way to learn a bit of the language her ancestors spoke. Aansaamb is a Michif word meaning “together” or “among”. “I love the way it speaks more broadly, to the concepts within the work, like being among the land, with each other, and being together with my daughter holding these works, and carrying forward this love and care and intimacy within the piece.”
With her first public-art photography installation in 2023, she makes all things good, presented by AKA Artist-Run in Saskatoon, Margaretta learned about creating a work with its environment in mind, as she did with Aansaamb.
“Something really beautiful with those works is the curation with the sky and other natural elements,” she says. The lighting in Aansaamb is warm and gives the photo a dream-like quality, which Margaretta says is due to the hot weather on that July Sunday on the riverbank, though the photo interacts with the sky as well. “The work kind of shifts and changes depending on when you see it,” she says. “It’s really interesting to be able to curate with this element, which is just the vast sky, and that’s something that I don't often get the opportunity to do.”
So far, Margaretta has seen the finished piece on the Dal Grauer building only at night, under a dark sky. “I was taking a taxi home and it was really late, and I looked out and I saw that it was all up, and I got so excited and told the cab driver,” she says with a laugh.
In this year’s Capture Photography Festival print catalogue, Aansaamb is accompanied by a poem, which Margaretta felt was a better fit than an academic interpretation of the photograph. Titled “In Conversation With Aansaamb”, the poem was written by Tenille K Campbell, a Dene-Métis author and photographer whose family is also from St. Louis. “It’s a really beautiful poem that speaks to the work,” Margaretta says, “but also to her own experiences as an Indigenous mother, and it really elevates the work.”
Curated by Capture’s Emmy Lee Wall, Aansaamb will be on view until March 2026, on the facade of the three-storey concrete building at 944 Burrard Street. 
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