Dana Claxton: Made To Be Ready

Dana Claxton’s solo exhibition, “Made To Be Ready”, currently on view at Vancouver’s Audain Gallery, reclaims and celebrates Indigenous visual culture within the complex contexts of the visual arts institution, popular fashion and an evolving Canadian social and political climate. In this exhibition Claxton marries high art and high fashion, presenting new photographic works and one video piece all featuring her longtime collaborator and model, Samaya Jardey. Playing off of the tropes of the fashion industry through the use of stylized apparel, glossy photographs and staged sets, Claxton represents contemporary Indigeneity in a precise synthesis of the contemporary and the traditional, the sacred and the secular.

With an economy of works (four pieces in the 2000 square foot gallery) each beholds a sharp dynamism. The gallery, expertly prepared by curator Amy Kazymerchyk with blackened walls and dim lighting, transforms into a tranquil and meditative refuge. Each piece benefits from the space with which it has been allotted–space which demands its audience reflect on Claxton’s presentation of Indigenous identity within a contemporary context.

Throughout Claxton’s 25-year career as an artist, curator and educator in Vancouver, she has powerfully reflected on the dehumanization, racism and violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Though her works vary in form (from found documents to video art, photography and performance) her artistic output is consistently strong, visually arresting and emotionally honest.

Claxton’s recent and diverse works in the highly acclaimed travelling exhibition “Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop, and Aboriginal Culture” in 2013,((“Beat Nation” began originally at grunt gallery in 2008 as a website project curated by Tania Willard and Skeena Reece, evolving later into an exhibition curated by former Vancouver Art Gallery associate curator Kathleen Ritter.)) as well as in “Ghost Dance”, featured at Ryerson Image Centre in the same year, demonstrates her incredible range and unyielding voice within the Canadian politic.

In “Made To Be Ready” Claxton continues her examination of the representation and appropriation of Indigeneity, in this case turning her attention to the way in which First Nations’ belongings have been misrepresented within mainstream culture, visual arts and museum settings. As Marcia Crosby recounts in her text Construction of the Imaginary Indian (1999), First Nations’ objects have been collected and displayed by Western civilizations for hundreds of years, often exhibited as passive artifacts of a dying culture.  This claiming of Indigenous cultural objects is an extension of the colonial project–an act of domination and dispossession.

In “Made To Be Ready” Claxton reanimates and reclaims Indigenous belongings, countering the dehumanizing approach Western institutions have historically practiced by instead resituating Aboriginal visual culture within an informed and personal context.

For this collection of new works Claxton draws on an aesthetic specific to the Lakota First Nations-Wood Mountain reserve where she is from. The objects, many of which are the artist’s own, are luxurious and beautiful. Here, Claxton develops a renewed sense of beauty which exists outside of Eurocentric definitions.

The insistence on a non-Western perspective is key to this collection of works, countering a history of decontextualized misrepresentation. As a starting point Claxton observes that in Indigenous languages there is no word for “art”. Instead, aesthetic materials always contain some form of spiritual, domestic or social function; that is, they are made to be ready. As Claxton describes, objects are considered active entities embedded with potential (not dormant or inert materials as Western representations lead viewers to believe).

In Headdress (2015), displayed in a firebox (a twist on the fluorescent light boxes to which Vancouver photography veteran Jeff Wall is so commonly associated), Claxton takes on the appropriation of Indigenous patterns and dress in mainstream culture. By stringing together her personal collection of jewelry, the artist has designed a beautiful ornament that combines the aesthetic appeal and spiritual depth of the traditional garment referenced in the work’s title. The colourful collection of beads, string and bone retains a sacredness completely absent from the battle crowns worn by the uniformed concert goers Claxton directly critiques.

Claxton wore a similar garment in her 2015 performance Fringed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In both cases the piece of jewelry is worn to veil the wearer’s face. This covering of the face is a complex proposition. While it may be interpreted as a symbolic enactment of the effacement experienced by Aboriginal women in Western society, it is also a gesture of will. The centralization of the Aboriginal female subject in so many of Claxton’s works is a powerful statement of resolute visibility and self-determination. This pointed imagery of female Indigineity is particularly evocative in this pressing moment in Canadian history where the erasure and violence towards First Nations women is finally the focus of the political and social action it deserves.

Also displayed in a backlit firebox is Claxton’s photographic work Cultural Belongings (2015) wherein a woman is posed grasping a Lakota horse dance stick. The life-size image captures the model’s forward movement, the picture taken mid-step while she is trailed by a collection of shields, drums and parfleche (buffalo hide) bags. Staged employing visual cues from a fashion editorial shoot, Claxton maps a glamour specific to Indigenous women while avoiding the tokenism so often perpetrated by Western representations of Aboriginal peoples. Again in this image the woman’s face remains covered–centralizing the objects while combating objectification.

Buffalo Woman 1 and 2 cascade luxuriously from the gallery’s ceiling. Two images printed on silk panels present a woman in an elegant gown holding a white crystal buffalo skull. In the first she presses the animal head to her face in meditative celebration. In the second the model thrusts the buffalo head to the sky, exultant.  The layering of these two panels and the subtle difference between them creates a slow but deliberate movement central to this exhibition. The transparency of the silk achieves a lightness that is coupled by the tenacity of the subject. These works in combination portray a powerful narrative.

This characteristic action is harnessed in the only video piece featured in the exhibition. Projected across the entirety of one of the gallery’s walls, the piece, titled Uplifting (2015), features a stark background and a female figure. She performs a protracted journey, crawling across a floor under the gaze of an intense spotlight. The subject’s red dress hypnotizes amidst an otherwise anonymous setting.

Claxton is known for her arresting video works like I Want To Know Why (1994), which marked her early endeavors to represent colonial oppression. Her multi-channel work Rattle (2003) traces the artist’s shift in focus towards filling gallery spaces with spiritual elements of her own cultural heritage. In Uplifting, the viewer bears witness to the character’s slow but steadfast trek. This piece, like each of the others in the exhibition, is enormous in scale, intimating the experience of a direct encounter with a human, a history, a story and a future.

While it should be incumbent upon all Canadians to inform themselves about this nation’s settler history, Claxton’s work helps to facilitate this ongoing process of self-education. This new collection of images, in their life-size scale, inserts the viewer into a necessary conversation with the pieces and themselves.  “Made To Be Ready” is not an exhibition about Aboriginal women. It is an exhibition about everyone who lives in the shadow cast by Canada’s colonial legacy.

Dana Claxton: Made To Be Ready, curated by Amy Kazymerchyk, exhibits at Audain Gallery, Vancouver, from January 14th to March 12th 2016.

Shauna Jean Doherty is a critic and curator based in Vancouver, BC. Her writing and curatorial projects are primarily concerned with the semiotic and social impacts of technological progress. She currently works as Distribution Manager at VIVO Media Arts Centre.