Redskin Imaginary

Date: Saturday March 13, 2010

Artists: Lori Blondeau and Dana Claxton

Curator: Jackson 2Bears

By Donation

REDSKIN IMAGINARY brought together two artists re-thinking Indigenous heritage and ancestry at the intersection of our traditional teachings and the postmodern notion of Hauntology. That is, thinking about our inheritance as a form of haunting or ghosting in which identity is spectralized as a product of our colonial reality, and where contemporary modes of expression rooted in our oral traditions of storytelling form a basis for cultural, social and political critique. Here, the works of these artists emerged as powerful forms of creative resistance and resurgence through deconstructing the legacy of a violent, discriminatory, racist and genocidal past to which we are the heirs.

LORI BLONDEAU is a performance artist based in Saskatoon and a member of George Gordon First Nation. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1994, Blondeau with Bradlee LaRocque co-founded Tribe: A Centre for Evolving Aboriginal Media, Visual and Performing Arts. Blondeau’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her current work is a series of three performances based on memory and home, displacement and decolonization. In 2006, Blondeau had a solo exhibition Grace at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon and 2007 at the Venice Biennale she was part of the Requickening project with Shelley Niro.

DANA CLAXTON works in film, video, photography, multi channel installation, performance, curation, aboriginal broadcasting and pedagogy. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Centre, Sundance Film Festival and the Eiteljorg Museum and is held in public collections such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Art Bank of Canada and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. She has received numerous awards including the VIVA Award and the Eiteljorg Fellowship. She has presented papers at the Getty Institute and with the Mid-American Art College Association and the Art College Association (USA). 

JACKSON 2BEARS (curator) is a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) multimedia artist based in Victoria, BC. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, including EM-Media, Calgary; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Interaccess, Toronto; SAW Gallery, Ottawa; the North American Indigenous Games, Cowichan; and internationally in festivals and group exhibitions such as Digital Art Weeks, Zurich, Switzerland. 2bears is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Victoria.