Description
Known for her expansive multidisciplinary approach to art making Vancouver-based Dana Claxton, who is Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux), has investigated notions of Indigenous identity, beauty, gender and the body, as well as broader social and political issues through a practice which encompasses photography, film, video and performance. Rooted in contemporary art strategies, her practice critiques the representations of Indigenous people that circulate in art, literature and popular culture in general. In doing so, Claxton regularly combines Lakota traditions with "Western" influences, using a powerful and emotive "mix, meld and mash" approach to address the oppressive legacies of colonialism and to articulate Indigenous world views, histories and spirituality. This timely catalogue will be the first monograph to examine the full breadth and scope of Claxton's practice. It will be extensively illustrated and will include essays by Claxton's colleague Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia; Monika Kin Gagnon, Professor in the Communications Department at Concordia University, who has followed Claxton's work for 25 years; Olivia Michiko Gagnon, a New York-based scholar and doctoral student in Performance Studies; and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
About the authors
Grant Arnold is Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where over the past 20 years he has organized more than 35 exhibitions of historical, modern and contemporary art. He has also contributed essays and articles to exhibition catalogues, books and journals, recent examples being Ken Lum, Mark Lewis: Cold Morning, and Roy Arden: Against the Day. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Monika Kin Gagnon's writings have been published in numerous books, including topographies: aspects of recent B.C. art, Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, and A Leap in the Dark, as well as many artist catalogues and magazines. She has a doctorate in philosophy from Simon Fraser University, and a Masters degree from York University. She is an associate professor in Communications Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
