Kent Monkman
Hi everyone!
*waves*
I'd do a little life update but the idea is kind of exhausting at the moment. So I'll just not...
I've been wanting to write about my favourite new (to me) artist, Kent Monkman. He's of Cree ancestry and does amazing installation pieces and photography and films, often through the perspective of his berdache alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. He plays with history and that makes me gleeful. I'll just c/p some stuff and pictures.
This ageless beauty, whose fashion icon is Cher and whose platform heels are seven inches high, is the consummate impresario.
She is part hunter, warrior, adventurer, time traveller, artist, film director, star, two-spirit seductress and the alter ego of the Toronto artist Kent Monkman.
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"Inserting an aboriginal way of seeing the world is what it's about, but using this vocabulary," says Monkman. "I'm doing it using this preexisting European language."
In other words, he takes this towering conceptual load of Western painting convention and tackles it on its own turf. His processing of these idioms is, in and of itself, a commentary on them: He makes us recognize just how much authority we invest in this art tradition.
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[Film still from 'Group of Seven Inches']
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Rez-Erection: Belle Sauvage, Buffalo Boy and Miss Chief Eagle Testickle set up Camp
"Kent Monkman's alterego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle's adventures and histories are captured in a trilogy of films expanding the critique of colonialism to all things canonical like Edward S. Curtis, Western films and George Catlin. In Group of Seven Inches, Monkman inverts the colonial gaze by presenting Miss Chief as the one with the brush, painting her understanding of the white man as she explores two hot hapless white men. Shooting Geronimo finds Miss Chief changing history one highheeled kick at a time as she records the history of two young 'braves' taking power back from the little white man behind the camera who desires more than their picture. Robin's Hood brings that wandering artist, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle into Sherwood Forest for her ultimate trist.
The strategies of mimicry, parody and masquerade allow for a humourous but unsettling window into the relationship of sex and conquest, desire and colonial representation. In wilding the West, all three artists transform the 3 C's of Capitalism, Christianity and Colonialism into Camp, Chance and Celebration."
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[The photographs referred to below]
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From another article: "Monkman's photographs reproduce daguerreotypes nearly perfectly, dark and silvery and ancient, providing the same time warp on first impression as the paintings, if it weren't for the size 11 white patent leather high heels that give up their contemporariness.
The film also recreates the silent film era style - the plot features Miss Chief on a mission to record the white man in his original context, before contact with the red man perverts his roots. Just like how colonialists dressed up natives in folkloric costume for photo shoots, so does Miss Chief: She gets a couple of cute white boys drunk and dresses them up as Europeans, powdered wigs and all.
The exercise of mockery Monkman makes doesn't diminish the seductive power of his dainty, careful works. The photographs, especially, are such amazing historical reproductions that there is obviously more to Monkman's message than a joke. By toppling the power dynamic between colonialist and colonized, and furthermore, by sexualizing and aestheticizing that power struggle, Monkman reinvents the nature of beauty."
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Another: "Inspired by early 19th-century artists Paul Kane and George Catlin, who became famous for their depictions of the Indians of the Wild Old West, Miss Chief has “determined to dedicate whatever talents and proficiency I possess to the painting of a series of pictures illustrative of the European male.”
[...] The doubling in Monkman's travelling gallery conceit turns his own show into an installation work. At its centre is the shimmering Theatre de Cristal, a transparent teepee-cum-cinema, made of strings of glistening beads, in which two short films are projected on a white simulated buffalo hide
[...] A case contains her red high heels with beadwork (Made in China), her dream-catcher bra, her red-silk-lined raccoon jock strap and her Louis Vuitton arrow quiver."
*waves*
I'd do a little life update but the idea is kind of exhausting at the moment. So I'll just not...
I've been wanting to write about my favourite new (to me) artist, Kent Monkman. He's of Cree ancestry and does amazing installation pieces and photography and films, often through the perspective of his berdache alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. He plays with history and that makes me gleeful. I'll just c/p some stuff and pictures.
This ageless beauty, whose fashion icon is Cher and whose platform heels are seven inches high, is the consummate impresario.
She is part hunter, warrior, adventurer, time traveller, artist, film director, star, two-spirit seductress and the alter ego of the Toronto artist Kent Monkman.
--
"Inserting an aboriginal way of seeing the world is what it's about, but using this vocabulary," says Monkman. "I'm doing it using this preexisting European language."
In other words, he takes this towering conceptual load of Western painting convention and tackles it on its own turf. His processing of these idioms is, in and of itself, a commentary on them: He makes us recognize just how much authority we invest in this art tradition.
-
[Film still from 'Group of Seven Inches']
-
Rez-Erection: Belle Sauvage, Buffalo Boy and Miss Chief Eagle Testickle set up Camp
"Kent Monkman's alterego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle's adventures and histories are captured in a trilogy of films expanding the critique of colonialism to all things canonical like Edward S. Curtis, Western films and George Catlin. In Group of Seven Inches, Monkman inverts the colonial gaze by presenting Miss Chief as the one with the brush, painting her understanding of the white man as she explores two hot hapless white men. Shooting Geronimo finds Miss Chief changing history one highheeled kick at a time as she records the history of two young 'braves' taking power back from the little white man behind the camera who desires more than their picture. Robin's Hood brings that wandering artist, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle into Sherwood Forest for her ultimate trist.
The strategies of mimicry, parody and masquerade allow for a humourous but unsettling window into the relationship of sex and conquest, desire and colonial representation. In wilding the West, all three artists transform the 3 C's of Capitalism, Christianity and Colonialism into Camp, Chance and Celebration."
-
[The photographs referred to below]
-
From another article: "Monkman's photographs reproduce daguerreotypes nearly perfectly, dark and silvery and ancient, providing the same time warp on first impression as the paintings, if it weren't for the size 11 white patent leather high heels that give up their contemporariness.
The film also recreates the silent film era style - the plot features Miss Chief on a mission to record the white man in his original context, before contact with the red man perverts his roots. Just like how colonialists dressed up natives in folkloric costume for photo shoots, so does Miss Chief: She gets a couple of cute white boys drunk and dresses them up as Europeans, powdered wigs and all.
The exercise of mockery Monkman makes doesn't diminish the seductive power of his dainty, careful works. The photographs, especially, are such amazing historical reproductions that there is obviously more to Monkman's message than a joke. By toppling the power dynamic between colonialist and colonized, and furthermore, by sexualizing and aestheticizing that power struggle, Monkman reinvents the nature of beauty."
-
-
Another: "Inspired by early 19th-century artists Paul Kane and George Catlin, who became famous for their depictions of the Indians of the Wild Old West, Miss Chief has “determined to dedicate whatever talents and proficiency I possess to the painting of a series of pictures illustrative of the European male.”
[...] The doubling in Monkman's travelling gallery conceit turns his own show into an installation work. At its centre is the shimmering Theatre de Cristal, a transparent teepee-cum-cinema, made of strings of glistening beads, in which two short films are projected on a white simulated buffalo hide
[...] A case contains her red high heels with beadwork (Made in China), her dream-catcher bra, her red-silk-lined raccoon jock strap and her Louis Vuitton arrow quiver."