Niro’s quiet revolution
Renowned Indigenous artist’s career survey at Ryerson transforms past traumas into hope
I last saw Shelley Niro on a chilly afternoon in March. There she was, towering almost three storeys high over North James St., Hamilton’s hipster refuge, glowering from behind horn-rimmed glasses.
“Abnormally aboriginal” read the text below the neckline of her black T-shirt, hovering above a coil of DNA and a hackneyed Indian-head icon, in profile, like a Chicago Blackhawks logo in miniature.
I had to smile. Earlier that day, I had run across Niro in the flesh inside the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where her exhibition 1779 was nearing the end of its run. It was coincident, a happy stumble-upon. Bashful, wry and understated as ever, Niro was touring a small group of high school girls from the nearby Six Nations Reserve through the show with their art teacher.
Niro chose to slip quietly under your skin and fashion her work as an opening-up more than a shouting down, even in its provocations
Corralled together by the teacher for a photo op in front of one of her works, Niro shrugged, mildly embarrassed, and summoned up an awkward smile.
Niro, who is Mohawk, has never been much for attention, and likes to let her work speak for itself. That said, that little moment in the gallery helped to make her priorities loud and clear. I had met her the year before, when she was a finalist for the Scotiabank Photography Prize. Her photo installation project Battlefields of my Ancestors had been installed at Fort York for the Contact Photography Festival, and when we met there, I was struck by her humour and quiet grace. A year later, Niro sits at the top of Contact’s marquee as the winner of the $50,000 award and the subject of a career survey at the Ryerson Image Centre that comes with it.
One step into the show, which opened last week, it all comes together.
Over here, a pair of cyanotypes, casting their subjects in icy blue: In one, a pair of teenage Indigneous girls, vamping for the camera; in another, the placid face of an older Indigenous woman, smile lines carved deep. Over there, a multi-panel piece called Ghosts, Girls, Grandmas, young and old women in communion with a generation lost to the rot and despair of residential schools — the ghosts, a space in-between — bordered in wampum beads.
Near the door, the clincher: a black-and-white image of an elderly Indigenous woman holding a bird’s nest, cuddled from behind by the two young women, bordered with a handmade mat of fabric and beads. She tilts her head away the camera, coy, welcome but knowing. The girls behind her clown. Its title: Time Travels Through Us, lifts the scene from one of casual affection to something towering, totemic — past traumas endured for the promise of a hopeful future, alive in a single image, together. It’s also very personal: the images are of her mother and her daughters.
Coming on the heels of that Hamilton show — that highschool tour, that cringe-inducing photo op — you see what that day must have meant to her. Niro’s work centres powerfully not only around brutal histories and colonial ills, but ways to transmute ingrained trauma from past horror to peaceful future.
More to the point is a core element of Niro’s recently blossoming renown — before the Hamilton show, there was a 2017 Governor General’s Award, with the Scotiabank prize on its heels — that Ryerson more fully than any other, embraces and owns: Niro’s work is explicit in feminine modes of sharing, intergenerational trauma morphing into resilience from grandmother to mother to daughter. On the wall of a nearby display of her videos, she makes it plain: “We work in the direction of ending the trauma,” she writes, “and letting our children be children.”
Amissing piece not at Ryerson — one I’ve seen elsewhere that, for me, that helps tie it all together — is The Iroquois Is a Highly Developed Matriarchal Society, a triptych of hand-tinted photos from 1991 of Niro’s mother under a standard-issue hair salon dryer, framed by a mat with hand-drilled Iroquois designs (Iroquois is the slightly outdated term for the people who now largely refer to themselves as Haudenosaunee, which includes Mohawk).
It was a departure point for the artist — her first serious work, she told me last year — and it would be right at home here.
Niro’s work is plainspoken, not outraged, though it has every right to be, and humour often reigns in her efforts to address a dismal past with a subtle insistence of Indigenous life right here in the present (her mother, now deceased, was always up for her daughter’s adventures; in Matriarchal, she’s laughing her head off ).
In the big gallery beyond the entrance, you’ll find The Shirt, likely Niro’s signature piece, a comedy routine of colonial slaughter, if such a thing could be possible — humour’s soft power used to break open a story otherwise too awful to confront (“My ancestors were annihilated, exterminated, murdered and massacred,” reads the T-shirt worn by an Indigenous woman in aviator glasses, stars and stripes bandana on her head; eight panels to the same effect later, the last one reads ‘And all’s I get is this shirt.”)
But it feels obligatory here, an add-on, however welcome, to a larger, more cohesive narrative that Niro’s been building all her career. On the adjacent wall, three generations of Indigenous women are pictured in separate portraits, crafting objects, together alone.
Across from The Shirt, another multi-panel work, Are You My Sister — a reference, I imagine, to the broken families left behind by residential schools here — is absent her trademark loudly, Niro chose instead to slip quietly under your skin and fashion her work as an openingup more than a shouting down, even in its provocations like The Shirt (an accompanying video piece to it here shows her model stifling a giggle, while a friendly-sounding country twang plays in the background).
Back though, to that big image on a Hamilton wall, which, the Ryerson show reveals, is only one of three.
From Abnormally Aboriginal, with horn-rimmed glasses that were standard government issue to all women on reserve, we shift to Normal Original, Niro in black Wayfarers, DNA and Indian-head icon below. In the triptych’s final image, she completes the transformation: It’s Niro unfiltered, no glasses, no cliched “Indian head,” and no label.
It’s the future she’s been quietly crafting all along, where the labels dissolve to reveal the person right in front of you. We’re not there yet. But Niro, with her quiet, open appeal, is helping to lead the way.
Scotiabank Photography Award: Shelley Niro continues at the Ryerson Image Centre to Aug. 5. For more information please see ryersonimagecentre.ca