DANA CLAXTON

Born 1959 in Yorkton, Canada. Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

Dana Claxton, Sitting Bull and The Moose Jaw Sioux, 2003 (installation view), four-channel video installation. Courtesy of Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal / La Biennale de Montréal. Photograph: Guy L'Heureux

Dana Claxton is a First Nations Canadian artist working in film, video, performance art, photography and installation. Born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, of Lakota descent, her work seeks to address and bring forward social justice in the face of colonialism’s marauding trajectory, and to combine traditional Lakota knowledge and aesthetics within a contemporary art context. Alongside her art practice, Claxton also works as an independent curator and educator, having taught at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. She was a founding member of the Vancouver-based Indigenous Media Arts Group, and her works have been exhibited in Canada and internationally.

Looking at the impact of colonialism, early video works such as Grant Her Restitution (1991) and I Want to Know Why (1994) interrogated the treatment of women in Canada. Since then, works such as The Red Paper (1996), The People Dance (2001), Rattle (2003) and Tatanka Wanbli Chekpa Wicincala (2006) attempt, in Claxton’s own words, ‘to bring spirit into the gallery space’. In Rattle, traditional horsehair and beaded rattles are shown across four screens, shaken in real time and slowed down. The ceremonial rattles, along with a soundscape that includes traditional singing, represent a contemporary, mediated visual prayer. This combination of the sacred and secular appears throughout Claxton’s work, as in On to the Red Road (2006), a series of five photographs in which a woman’s dress is transformed from traditional ceremonial clothing through to shorter skirts and lengthening red boots – both a serious and playful look at stereotypes of traditional/ modern femininity.

More recently, Claxton has been working on a portrait series entitled Paint Up (2009). Her subject, Joseph Paul, is a ceremonial Black Face dancer in the Salish tradition and awarded pow-wow dancer living on the Musqueam Indian Reserve in the greater Vancouver area. In the striking, large-scale colour images, Paul gazes out at the viewer, his face painted in ceremonial black, white, red and yellow designs, his hair braided. These imposing images, striking and cool, throw down a challenge to the sterile, nonspiritual, materialistic view of contemporary life.

Exhibited at 17th Biennale of Sydney, Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux (2003) combines interviews, landscape scenery and appropriated footage in a contemporary view of a historical story: after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota chief who famously defeated General Custer by the Little Bighorn River, led a group to Canada where they were given refuge by the British and set up a camp next to the town of Moose Jaw. The encampment was inhabited until 1921. Claxton was commissioned by the Moose Jaw Art Gallery to research its story in a fascinating four-channel video installation in which she presents archival images, interviews with descendants of the camp’s original inhabitants – some of whom were her relatives – and footage of the site, memorialising the land with its flora, fauna and natural beauty.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘The Barbarian’, On Main, Vancouver, Canada
2009 ‘New Work’, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
2008 ‘The Mustang Suite’, Alternator Art Gallery, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
2007 ‘Starting From Home’, online exhibition, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
2004 ‘Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux’, Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, Moose Jaw, Saskachewan, Canada

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Steeling the Gaze’, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
2009 ‘Native Visuality’, C.N. Gorman Museum, University of Davis, California, USA
2007 ‘Crack the Sky’, Montreal Biennale, Montreal, Canada
2004 ‘Gatherings: Aboriginal Art from the Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery’, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangdong, China
1996 ‘Topographies’, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

Selected Bibliography

Lynne Bell, The Post/Colonial Photographic Archive and the Work of Memory, Gallery 44, Canada, YY Z Books, 2006
David Garneau, ‘Dana Claxton’s The Patient Storm’, ConunDrumOnline, Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, issue 4, 2005: www.conundrumonline.org
Michelle La Flamme, ‘Dana Claxton: Reframing the Sacred and Indigenizing the White Cube’, Diversity and Dialogue, exhibition catalogue, University of Washington Press, Washington, 2007
Monika Kin Gagnon, Topographies: Aspects of Recent B.C. Art, exhibition catalogue, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1996
Monika Kin Gagnon, ‘Worldviews in Collision: Dana Claxton’s Video Installations’, Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 2000