Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother · Exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology
“Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother” Exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology
Vancouver, Canada · December 4, 2025 — March 29, 2026
artwork by Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien
co-curated by Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien, Kate Hennessy, and Hannah Turner
molo is pleased to support Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. “Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother” is an exhibition that honours and extends the ancient structures of Northwest Coast weaving practice through contemporary technologies.
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 1 The Burden of Being an Echo, 2025
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 2 The Burden of Being an Echo, 2025
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 3 The Burden of Being an Echo, 2025
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 4 The Burden of Being an Echo, 2025
+ Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother, 2022
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 5 Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother, 2022
+ Wrapped in the Cloud, 2018
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 6 Wrapped in the Cloud, 2018
+ Kuugan Jaad I and III, 2015
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 7 photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 8 The Burden of Being an Echo, 2025
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 9 Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother, 2022
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
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Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien · Exhibition · 10 The Burden of Being an Echo, 2025
photo by Dennis Ha, courtesy of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC
“We hear about the tree as a symbol of life. As such an old, slow growing life form, it is possible to view a tree as something that is nearly eternal within the trunk, while the leaves are a temporary expression. In our lives we are as leaves on the tree: momentary phases of a greater cycle, cast off and replaced with each season of the generations. The vitality of life remains within the trunk, turning over itself each season, drawing from earth and its own recycled energy. Each year coming closer to understanding itself over the course of decades, centuries, millennia. Like an ancient unfolding, paced and unchanging, deepening in its beauty each year. What trees carry is the energy of regrowth, regeneration, the oldest of ways. They are as close as we can come to the life force that is stored and recreated in that trunk.
To split the new growth of that open, like weaving, is to release that energy that precedes us. Earth as a living library that through our senses we can communicate with. Along with the river, I wish to also find the memoirs of the forest floor, that it keeps in the leaves, that it keeps in the sap. Blood and sap as memory, an ancient and renewable energy. Living energy in the rocks, breathing ocean believe me, I love you.
While splitting apart this material of new growth of the tree, it is as though I am deconstructing an expression of nature. I feel the stored energy is released, making it available to be understood more deeply. While weaving with cedar bark, I have found a connection or an entrance into a different measure of time. As trees grow, so slowly, so too do these baskets. I feel my energy sink into the slow, steady beat of life independent of our measure of it. I had carried a wish for so many years for an exit out of human consciousness. I found that space with weaving cedar.
The inarticulate beauty of that without voice brings language from another world closer to me. The slow arc of deconstructed new growth folds me back together in my womb, deep inner abdominal. Rolling stitches of time spin forwards as waves, measured in terms of a life, it draws mind into object; into old ways and memories, barely made sense of, that without fingers coils my own. The other night I looked at the silhouette of the trees. I felt little explosions in my body, micro explosions of the microcosm that somehow got released from my little stitches.
The wakefulness in my hands is what is spreading across my body. As it roars inside me, it sweeps through the dusty corners. And wind energy blows through the dormant cabinets left in my mind, preparing to force its way back into the world. The luxurious breath of our ancestors living through the senses of my body. Keeping the kinetic embrace for the hollow beating of the drum. Yearning lists on the paper prepare to be enacted. As my wakefulness breathes, I drift in my mind. As if to another continent of myself.“
— Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien
petal pink textile softwall designed by Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen for molo, is used as a practical division and backdrop, but also as an expanded metaphor for the Repetto boxes included in the exhibition and the vertical weave of the baskets and robes. Arranged in a large circle, the shape is a welcoming one which promotes connectivity, nurture, and matriarchal lineage, softening the traditional cube of a gallery and drawing guests together to experience the works. Like the weavings, softwall displays its internal structure as both form, function, and strength—an interlocking lattice that both shapes and defines.
In conversation with Forsythe and MacAllen, Jaad Kuujus-Meghann O’Brien drew connections between softwall and woven room dividers used by earlier Northwest Coast societies. These woven walls were used to create privacy while maintaining a certain openness that is typically limited by traditional walls. They held people together, rather than concealing and creating distrust. Forsythe and MacAllen experienced similar processes for transformational and emotional spacemaking while visiting and researching coastal communities in Colombia as part of their graduate work. These early discoveries influenced their own design thinking and development of the soft collection.