Preview
BACK/FLASH
Until December 7
Walter Phillips Gallery
Banff Centre
Art produced by Aboriginal Peoples in Canada has too often been placed in the category of "aboriginal art."
A new exhibition entitled Back/Flash at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre is challenging that erroneous way of thinking by offering a survey of works by Canadian aboriginal new media artists.
"Media art is made through apparatuses of the machine – video cameras, computers, virtual reality, the cyber domain, projections and digital technology," says Back/Flash curator Dana Claxton. "Within all this high-tech whirlwind, there is an investigation of self – an aboriginal self as it relates to the machine, to culture, to time, to being. Media artists use technology to tell stories, contest the stolen and broken landscape, make new meanings from old tired images and create new narratives that locate aboriginality within discourses of place, self, historicity and the machine."
Singer-songwriter and new media artist Buffy Sainte Marie attempts to achieve what Claxton refers to as "an investigation of self" with her print Pink Village. Using an archival black-and-white photograph as source material, Sainte Marie discards the notion that aboriginal culture is something that belongs in a dusty archive or the vault of some museum. Using computer software, the artist has carefully placed layer over layer of pixelated colour on the original print, creating a striking image that reveals a computer-based work of an elder floating in a colour-filled sky. Gone is the stoic romanticism that is the domain of much of the historical imagery of First Nations people (such as the work of photographer Edward S. Curtis.) Instead, Sainte Marie has created a work in vivid computer generated colour that proudly proclaims her culture lives on in the computer age.
Zachery Longboy is an artist using both new and old media to describe a personal perspective. Originally from Churchill, Manitoba, he has become well-known for videos that explore his life as an aboriginal man living with HIV/AIDS. First getting involved with video 12 years ago at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, Longboy has gone on to help create the First Nations Video Access Programme to encourage Aboriginal people in Canada to make video. This time the Vancouver-based artist again uses his own story creating the piece Out to Dry.
A large tree with two video monitors dominates the installation. The monitors show excerpts from some of the artist’s previous videos, including his 1999 work Stone Show, which was about his reunion with his biological family and culture.
Extending from the tree is a line strung with black-and-white photographs. Those snapshots depict the duality of Longboy’s life. Raised in foster care, he grew up with two mothers – one white and one Aboriginal. One of the photos is of Longboy as a child, wearing a new sweater set and bow tie for a birthday party. Both sad and poignant, Out to Dry is an introspective work from a sensitive artist who continues to teach us much about what it means to be part of two cultures and never fully accepted by either one.
Thirza Cuthand successfully demonstrates that many aboriginal artists are no longer confined by the media they work with or the kinds of stories they tell. Her work Bi-Sexual Wannabe uses three banks of video monitors stacked atop each other to present images ranging from body parts to porn magazines, all while describing how she is the "only lesbian in Saskatoon."
It’s a short and simple work that reinforces how these artists are embracing new technology to explore a wide spectrum of subject matter – not only stories with an aboriginal genesis. These new media pioneers are creating a body of work that breaks free of the confines of "aboriginal art" and boldly provides the viewer with fresh perspectives. |
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