Dana Claxton: Artist Bio
Bio
Dana Claxton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes film and video, installation, performance and photography. Her work is held in public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Bank of Canada. Her work has been screened internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis). Her work has been screened at Sundance Festival and Microwave in Hong Kong.
She has taught at the Indigenous Media Arts Group and Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver and she was the 2003 Global Television Chair at the University of Regina in the School of Journalism where she taught Television and Radio broadcasting from the perspective of critical thinking and experimentation with sound and images. Dana was awarded the prestigious VIVA Award from the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation and in 2007 became an Eiteljorg Fellow sponsored by the Ford Foundation.
She is an active member in the arts community and has participated in panel discussions, juries, curatorial projects, advisory committees, mentoring youth and young artists. She is of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux ancestry and her family reserve is Wood Mountain.
Installation Work
Say It's OK, Winnipeg Art Gallery Commission, 2006
A young Indigenous boy tells a story of survival through colour.
Her Eyes of Seen Many Worlds, 2005 One Channel DVD
Working with light on my face, a story of healing powers is told.
Landscape #1, 2004 Two Channel DVD
A painterly approach to the Canadian plains landscape, collapsing the nature plains with farmed landscape.
Sitting Bull & the Moose Jaw Sioux, 2003 Four Channel DVD
(Commission by the Moose Jaw Art Gallery)
A contemporary view of a historical story. Interviews, landscape and appropriated footage.
Rattle, 2003 Four Channel DVD
A visual prayer attempting to create infinity. Much like a palindrome.
Waterspeak, 2002 Two Channel DVD
Woman tells the lesson she was taught about the sacredness of water and passes the teachings to Man.
The Heart of Everything That Is, 2002 Two Channel DVD
Woman and Man reveal the stars that come to earth and how freedom is attainable.
Buffalo Bone China 1997 One Channel
Mixed media china, stanchions, rope and ribbon. An experimental video metaphorically recalls First Nations peoples' loss of the buffalo and the historical use of buffalo bone to make fine china.
The Red Paper, 1996 One Channel DVD Mixed media - Chairs, frame
An all-aboriginal cast (but for two white actors distilled to the essence of a European male and female) is costumed in a low-budget opulence of flowing gowns, ruffled shirts and buckled boots, powerfully delivering pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue composed of "art thou's"... The Red Paper asserts a voice of power and interpretation recounting the devastating consequences of colonialism. The European male wears a strait jacket, repeatedly mumbling "I did not know, I did not know", in a familiar contemporary mantra that pleads self proclaimed absolution from guilt by reason of ignorance of history... Claxton irreverently and consciously opts for a lack of historical specificity in favour of a totalizing haunting by history in the present.
Single Channel Works
The Patient Storm, Urban Shaman Commission, 2006
Storm patiently waits for thunder, lighting and the rain. Short drama.
Anwolek- Regatta City 4.35, 2005 Commission Alternator Gallery
Commissioned by the Alternator Gallery in Kelowna, BC this work addresses memory, loss, identity, nostalgia and how indigenous land gets deterritorialized through pageantry. Rich with subtext and metaphor, this work engages 9/11, the shooting of JFK and Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl.
The Hill 3.49mins 2004
An aboriginal woman walks around the parliament buildings in Canada's capital, searching for a way in.
Gunplay 2.45mins 2004
A gun and an empty playground. This work questions how children learn violence at the playground and how the image of the "Indian Warrior" has been exploited to construct Indians as violent.
10 7.20mins 2003
A look at Agatha Christie's film 10 Little Indians and how it's implicated in the violence against indigenous people. Jump cutting 3 different film versions -from 3 different eras - the repeated nursery rhyme becomes more and more aggressive demonstrating the power of language, words and images.
Untitled 7.09, 2001
Untitled is about Canada's colonialism both past and present and how mechanisms of the oppression of aboriginal people construct your identity.
The People Dance (16mm) 23.51mins to Video, 2001
A surreal story about spirituality and infinity that blends Lakota worldview with media art.
Look Honey A Guerilla Girl 2.00mins 1997
A feminist drive by shooting with a post modern POV
I Want to Know Why 6.20mins 1994
The videomaker investigates the women in her family who have succumbed prematurely to external forces of racism and poverty. Using repetition and manipulation of western images of First Nations culture with an at first timid, then demanding voice over, the video moves through sorrow and indignation with the processes of cultural genocide.
The Shirt 6.27mins 1994
A visual study of a white shirt that gets washed ashore bringing with it the concept of time, money, the written word, church and oppression. It eventually exhibits its true transparent self.
Tree of Consumption 11.47mins 1993
In exploring the parallels between the treatment of the earth and the treatment of women, the artist has intentionally used low-end video equipment to produce a degenerated image. A woman stands in a destroyed forest among cut and broken trees. The images are also electronically "ripped, cut and torn" in post production eventually blurring the artist's body with that of the earth. The resulting video is an elegant impression of the artist's response to society's misuse of the environment coupled with the danger women face on the streets and in their homes.
Grant Her Restitution 10.29mins 1991
OUT OF CIRCULATION
Photography
Tatanka Wanbli Chekpa Wicincala 2006 30" x 40" ( 5 images in the series)
A study of the buffalo, eagle and twin girls. A removal from nature, while maintaining a spiritual connection.
Images One || Two || Three || Four || Five || Six || Seven || Eight
On to the Red Road 2006 6ft. x 5ft ( 5 images in the series)
The transformation of an indigenous woman, through the traditional ceremonial clothing and red boots.
Images One
Performance
FLOW
Western Front, Vancouver 2007
Ablakela with Primeaux and Mike
grunt gallery, Live At the End of the Century, Vancouver 1999
Buffalo Bone China
A Tribe Project with AKA Saskatoon Sask, 1997
SA (work in progress)
Western Front, Vancouver Canada 1994
Selected Bibliography
The following articles are in downloadble .pdf format.
This material is provided for research use only. Any subsequent usage or publishing without prior written consent is in contravention of copyright.
Monika Kin Gagnon
"Worldviews in Collision: Dana Claxton's Video Installations"
Other Conundrums, Race and Canadian Art.
Arsenal Press, artspeak, Kamloops Art Gallery.
Lynne Bell
"The Post/Colonial Photographic Archive and the Work of Memory"
2006 Gallery 44 YYZ Books.
Bea Medicine, Ph.D
Lakota Views of "Art" and Artistic Expression.
Quotes
Liturgy for a New Secular World
Glenn Alteen
Ablakela CD Rom, grunt gallery
Vancouver BC, 2000
"Claxton has often employed visual symbols and metaphor in her work to focus on colonialist double standards and destruction of First Peoples, customs and environment. Her production in film and video establishes her as an important voice in contemporary media production. Her video, film and installation works have largely over-shadowed Claxton's work in performance art but it is a medium she has returned to again and again."
"1992's Tree of Consumption (grunt 1992) focused on environmental issues and Claxton read texts as she wore a long flowing tree dress with five TV monitors. The video images were stark and chilling. Environmental destruction loomed large as a theme. For the performance Buffalo Bone China (Tribe and AKA1998) Claxton smashed fine bone china for 50 minutes highlighting the use of buffalo bones in colonial porcelain production. The production highlighted colonialist attitudes towards resources that have destroyed First Nation's economies."
History in Parts: The Work of Dana Claxton
Jason St. Laurent, SAW Video
For Art Star 2 Video Art Biennial August 12 - 27, 2005
Galerie SAW Gallery, Ottawa Ontario
"The dissection of language and stereotypes is also a prevalent feature of Dana Claxton¹s work. There is a Lakota worldview that natural/spiritual existence is "the heart of everything that is." It can also be understood that language is at the heart of everything. Used to construct stereotypes and to manipulate truth, language has the possibility to change the world for the worse. The works presented in this biennial attempt to redress the language imbalance in North America, wherein racist and complacent discourses are common. Mostly though, silence prevails. In Ottawa, for example, First Nations' historical and contemporary viewpoints are mostly absent from popular and institutional discourse despite the vibrant and sizable Aboriginal communities living in the city."
"Dana Claxton's work is esthetically innovative, brilliantly written and expertly paced. The thrust of her practice is political, spiritual and social, making it an essential contribution not only to the field of media art, but generally, to a more honest sense of history."
Wandering Spirit
Robin Laurence
The Georgia Straight, Vancouver BC
Publish Date: 24-Mar-2005
"Claxton, whose Anglo father separated early from her Lakota mother, also recounts a little of her childhood in small-town Saskatchewan, in Yorkton, where she was born, in Moose Jaw, where she did much of her growing up, and in Wadena, where she stayed with extended family. She and her three siblings were the target of racial taunts. Dirty little Indians. Half-breeds. Go back to the reserve. "We were always the brown kids", she says. "We were always 'the Other'." Then she adds, "It's funny, because Saskatchewan is such an Indian province." She remarks on the large aboriginal populations there and across North America. "You can completely opt out of the dominant culture if you want to and just live in 'Indian World'."
"Claxton herself travels back and forth between Vancouver, where she has lived for 25 years, and the Indian World of southern Saskatchewan and South Dakota, home of distant ancestors and close relations. Despite early pain and humiliation, she is strongly identified with her Lakota heritage. She has taken part in sacred ceremonies on both sides of the border, and has immersed herself in Lakota culture, spiritual beliefs, and history."
Exploring the Sacred in Aboriginal Performance Art
Kristin Dowell
e-misférica Performance and Politics in the Americas
New York, New York, issue 2.1, Spring 2005
"Aboriginal performance art reclaims the space of the Western art gallery to articulate Aboriginal stories, voices, and experiences. Aboriginal performance art also transforms the mainstream art gallery institution into a space that is responsive to and accessible for Aboriginal audiences. Within walls of the "white cube" (Claxton 2004) of the Western art gallery Aboriginal artists confront colonial histories, enact Aboriginal aesthetics, reflect Aboriginal cosmologies, and sustain Aboriginal communities."
"One of the striking ways in which Aboriginal performance turns the art gallery space into an Aboriginal space is through the incorporation of Aboriginal cultural protocols to reflect Aboriginal cosmologies. Ablakela is a piece about wakan¸ the Lakota concept of the sacred. Through the various elements of the performance - i.e. the braiding of sweetgrass and the use of ceremonial peyote songs - Claxton imbued the gallery space with elements of Lakota cosmology."
Installation Work
