Dana Claxton, Cultural Belongings, 2015. LED firebox with transmounted Lightjet Duratrans. | Photo courtesy of Dana Claxton
Vancouver-based artist Dana Claxton explores the life of Indigenous people in her artwork. Her new exhibition Made To Be Ready, which can be seen at SFU’s Audain Gallery, focuses on four selected video and photograph works depicting Indigenous women and cultural belongings.
The exhibition consists of two lightboxes, or fireboxes, as the artist calls them, named Cultural Belongings and Headdress. The video, The Uplifting, and the silk curtains, or windbox prints inBuffalo Woman 1 and 2, complete the show. While the lightboxes are the exhibition’s centerpiece, the video and windbox were included because both the curator and the artist felt strong connections to them, due to their content, spiritual similarities and material differences.
Amy Kazymerchyk, the exhibition’s curator, says each work portrays the same woman, Samaya Jardey from the Lakota First Nations-Wood Mountain reserve in Saskatchewan, with whom Claxton has worked with in various projects for over 25 years. Kazymerchyk explains that although Claxton has a very large body of work, she felt the show needed to be sparse and thus focus on significant pieces: four works portraying a woman with cultural belongings.
“The woman in each of the images has a very strong presence. Because each of the artworks is approximately life-size, when a visitor enters the gallery, they face each of the works as a single body,” says Kazymerchyk.
Meaningful installation
Dana Claxton, Headdress, 2015. LED firebox with transmounted Lightjet Duratrans. | Photo courtesy of Dana Claxton
The way the art works are installed is crucial, according to Kazymerchyk.
“One work is hung on each of the gallery’s four walls, each directly across from the one parallel. It creates a four-directional cross, which is an important part of the Lakota Sundance.”
The four figures face in a counter-clockwise circle, and Kazymerchyk explains that the show starts with the video of the woman in The Uplifting, who crawls from the entrance of the gallery towards the woman in Cultural Belongings, who is half bent and faces the third work, Buffalo Woman, in a warrior pose. Buffalo Woman in return stands tall with her arms raised and offers the buffalo skull she carries to the woman in Headdress, the last piece of the exhibition.
The curator believes the show invites people to spend time with the works, and she suggests visitors go when not in a rush.
“I think the exhibition really encourages visitors to look closely. Of course at the works, but perhaps even back at themselves,” says Kazymerchyk.
In Made To Be Ready, Kazymerchyk worked with Claxton for the first time, which she greatly enjoyed.
“I learned so much from Dana about how she approaches reading images, making images, imagining worlds through art and approaching criticism and encouragement in conversation.”
Claxton, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC, has exhibited work internationally at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Indigenous belongings: more than just objects
Kazymerchyk explains that the show’s title Made To Be Ready was suggested by Claxton, referring to a philosophy regarding Indigenous cultural belongings. The curator says the title counters the notion that Indigenous belongings, like drums, masks or baskets, are simply objects that are stolen, displayed or studied by anthropologists or explorers; these items are made to be used and have a purpose.
“These belongings are, in fact, made to be ready: to be danced, used in hunting and gathering, used in warfare, used in play, used in ritual, used to wear, used to travel,” explains Kazymerchyk.
The exhibition is currently on display at SFU’s Audain Gallery until March 12.
For more information, please visit www.sfu.ca/galleries/audain-gallery.html
