Description
Asiniy Iskwew, 2016, photographic prints, 17.15 x 25.5 cm. Series of four photographs.
The photographic series Asiniy Iskwew consists of four images by Manitoba-based artist Lori Blondeau. Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist from Saskatchewan, whose performative personas and work challenge media stereotypes of Indigenous women. Blondeau’s Asiniy Iskwew series (“Rock Woman” in Cree) depicts the resilience of Indigenous women in the face of historical and ongoing violence experienced, and survived. The series consists of four photographs, each featuring the artist in carefully staged locations, draped in a long red velvet robe in powerful pose, standing firmly upright, defiant, as she stares into the distance.
In each photograph, she stands on a plinth of natural stone, referencing the important connection of stone and rock formations to the traditions of Plains people, who have for countless generations used them for ceremony, for gathering places, or for markers of sacred place. In her staging of the series, Blondeau draws on the history and the cairn site of Mistaseni rock at Elbow Harbour, where Mistaseni — an enormous and sacred glacial boulder — was dynamited in 1966 by agents of the Saskatchewan government to make room for man-made Lake Diefenbaker.
