|
Dana Claxton
Baby Girlz Gotta Mustang, 2008
Lightjet c-print mounted on acid-free ultramount
image: 121.9 cm x 152.4 cm, unframed
edition 2/4
image courtesy the artist
ESTIMATE: $5,000
Since the early 1990s, Claxton (b 1959, Saskatchewan), a First Nations artist of Lakota (Sioux) descent, has investigated the historical and continuing impact of colonialism on Aboriginal cultures in North America. Her interdisciplinary work in film, video, installation, performance and photography has sought to deconstruct the ways in which images, philosophies and iconographies of First Nations are formed and commodified, both historically and in contemporary society. Claxton sites the early influence of surrealist black-and-white movies of the 40's in works that evocatively weave western and First Nations idioms together in contentious yet fluid dialogues. In the video The Red Paper (1996), for example, an all-Aboriginal cast mimics Elizabethan dialogue, and in the performance Buffalo Bone China (1997), Claxton smashes pieces of China made from buffalo bone. Baby Girlz Gotta Mustang is one of a suite of recent photographs—a medium the artist has lately concentrated on—pairing representatively contemporary Native models astride or beside commodities named after the feral horse once central to Native culture in central North America.
Claxton’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Bank of Canada. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), as well as at the Sundance Festival and Microwave in Hong Kong. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming 2010 Sydney Biennale, Australia.
|
|
|
|
