Emma Hassencahl-Perley’s painting practice focuses on exploring how Wabanaki visual culture can evolve through both digital experimentation and material techniques. The Fragmented series combines glitched digital drawings with hand-painted surfaces, using distortion to reexamine the ways images, histories, and cultural knowledge are preserved and transformed. Influenced by Wabanaki material and visual culture, the paintings feature the double-curve motif alongside fragmented forms to address the impact of technology and social media on community and culture. These works transition between the digital and physical realms, creating connections between cultural inheritance, memory, and contemporary Indigenous experiences. Rather than viewing fragmentation as a form of loss, the series considers how alteration can result in new perspectives, where familiar forms shift, overlap, and acquire new meanings.

Photos by Michael Patten