Transformer is thrilled to present A Tender Sieve, an exhibition by Canadian artist Mia Feuer. This exhibition is presented in tandem with Transformer's cultural partnership with the Embassy of Canada.

A Tender Sieve holds insult and offering at once. In hockey, a sieve is the failed goalie — the one who lets everything through. Yet to sieve is also to filter, to allow passage, to hold and release. Tender refers not only to the goal-tender who tends the net, but also to the act of care — tending the body, a community, an altar, or a practice.

Winnipeg-born Canadian sculptor Mia Feuer, herself a hockey goalie from a lineage of goaltenders, carries this inheritance as both vocation and ancestry. In her work, goaltending becomes a ritual framework for sculpture — a site where lineage, struggle, and metamorphosis are held and reimagined.

Central to this exhibition are sculptural depictions of butterfly chrysalises. The “Butterfly Technique” is among the most difficult and vulnerable positions in goaltending, where the goalie drops to their knees, pads splayed like wings across the crease. In these works, discarded goalie pads — already charged with histories of victories and failures — are transformed. Animism reframes vacancy as invitation: the pads are not inert equipment but vessels, porous with memory and alive with possibility. In becoming chrysalis, they embody both endurance and surrender, holding the tension between protection and transformation.

Through these works, the insult of the sieve is refigured as a metaphor for passage. Fragile membranes rupture, allowing wisdom, trauma, grief, and resilience to move across bodies and generations. A Tender Sieve reframes permeability not as failure but as a necessary condition for transformation — where tending, whether to a net, to kin, or to memory, becomes a form of devotion.

Bio:

“Through sculptural form, I grapple with motherhood, homesickness, ancestral disconnection and grief, tracing how these forces have shaped and unsettled my own lived experience. Forever informed by my upbringing in a working-class Ashkenazi family on Cree, Ojibwe, and Métis land, colonially known as Winnipeg, Manitoba, my sculptures examine the cultural signifiers and inherited narratives that emerge from that layered geo-history. My work investigates the fractures in familial, ecological, and spiritual relationships- pursuing visual modalities of healing, surrender, and liberation through the sculptural process. I continually explore how my creative practice and my spiritual practice are, in fact, the same strange thing. This exhibition marks my first solo show in Washington, DC since An Unkindness at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2013 — a pivotal project that seeded many of the themes I continue to work through today. Across the years, these ideas have deepened and converged: environmental devastation, family, and the trauma of synthetic materials, all refracted through the conceptual and material language of hockey. I am the mother of Galileo, an Associate Professor of Sculpture at California College of the Arts, and the Goalie for Oakland’s Project Mayhem.”