Sidestepping Categories

Using performances, videos or painting, you have created a radically new iconography, twisting colonial narratives of Canada’s colonisation. In the 19th century European painters pictured Natives as a disappearing race. You took the opposite view. The artists of that time were obsessed with the idea that Indigenous people were vanishing.They fetishized that vanishing and that suited the imperatives of colonial governments to remove Indigenous people from our lands. Albert Bierstadt (1) was painting landscapes that were essentially empty. They were like advertisements for a piece of real estate: “It’s the promised land and it’s vacant, so come in! Come and take it!”

There was also the myth of cultural purity. George Catlin (2) was obsessed with that idea. For him, Indigenous people didn’t exist unless they exist in this perfect time-capsule, pre-contact state. He despised what he viewed as contamination of Indigenous people with influence from European fashion. I have responded specifically to those ideas of fashion as an indicator of culture. Indige

« Miss Chief as a Performer in Catlin’s Gallery from the series The Emergence of a Legend (1/5) ». 2006. Collaboration avec / with le photographe Chris Chapman et / and la maquilleuse / makeup artist Jackie Shawn. Tirage chromogène sur papier métallique / chromogenic print on metallic paper. 16,5 x 11,5 cm