Paris/Ojibwa recalls the grand Parisian salons where French elites entertained. On the top third of each panel are paintings of human figures—representing a Dancer, Shaman, Warrior, and Healer—wearing blankets or Greco-Roman–style robes, their backs to viewers.

Houle’s installation takes viewers back to the time when these Ojibwa dancers, led by a man named Maungwudaus, travelled from Canada to Paris in the mid-1800s to dance for King Louis-Phillipe and an audience of four thousand French citizens. They face their ancestral homeland from a cemetery across the ocean.