"WESTERN" and "ROUNDUP", Kamloops Art Gallery, Jan 18 to March 23, 2013

×

1 of 4

Expand

"Baby Boyz Gotta Indian Pony"

Dana Claxton, "Baby Boyz Gotta Indian Pony," 2008, C-print, 60” x 48”

×

2 of 4

Expand

"An Indian Act Shooting the Indian Act"

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, "An Indian Act Shooting the Indian Act," 1997, installation detail. Collection of the Kamloops Art Gallery.

×

3 of 4

Expand

"Sign of the Spring"

Sonia Cornwall, "Sign of the Spring," 2002, oil on board, 12” x 16”.

×

4 of 4

Expand

"Baby Boyz Gotta Indian Pony"

Dana Claxton, "Baby Boyz Gotta Indian Pony," 2008, C-print, 60” x 48”

Prev

Next

Western and Roundup

Kamloops Art Gallery

Jan 18 to March 23, 2013

By Susan Buis

Western, a group exhibition, and Roundup, paintings by the late Interior B.C. artist and rancher Sonia Cornwall, welcome viewers with the scent of straw and thistle in an entrance painted yellow ochre, the colour of local hills and foliage from high summer to autumn. Cornwall’s land and cattle-scapes with their roasted colours bask sensuously in this golden field. As I write, I look out over ranchlands covered with spring’s straw-yellow stubble toward hills of deep coniferous blue-green, colours used on gallery walls to frame installations and evoke place, the theme chosen by curator Charo Neville as a focus for the gallery’s current exhibition program. Neville characterizes Western as multivalent: It presents diverse perspectives that contest limiting assumptions and stereotypes of the West – its history, inhabitants and cultures.

Stacked straw bales in Vancouver artist Cornelia Wyngaarden’s installation, As a Wife Has a Cow, create a folksy cliché that’s contradicted by Kelly Moll, the character in the video narrative, a chain-smoking female rancher who exudes strength and capability, totally at ease in her occupation of what some would identify as a male subject-position.

The Russian thistle, colloquially known as tumbleweed, that inhabits the DRIL collective’s installation, is an invasive species that chokes out indigenous grasses. No matter how many you fling off fences and send on their way down the road, no matter how many you pull or mow, it will always be here. Residents of ranchlands cannot romanticize tumbleweed in the same way that Hollywood does – as an indicator of desolation, lawlessness and colonial expansion. For DRIL, a collective of four Vancouver artists, tumbleweed is the invader, literally the occupier of the “dad’s” chair in the favoured spot before a TV console with its loop of cowboy movies in which the weed is both a character and a metaphor for the notion of ‘the West’.

Dana Claxton’s photo project, The Mustang Suite, is formally spare but thematically complex; the impassive yet confrontational gaze of Claxton’s First Nations’ “family” is intense amid props and attire that demonstrate the complexity of desire in staged subjects who embrace affluence and material signifiers of both traditional culture and contemporary consumerism.

Neville’s curatorial projects, notable for their conceptual rigour and meticulous installation, are designed with respect for the integrity of the art and the viewer’s experience. In Western, the works, while physically autonomous, overlap aurally. The guitar soundtrack and the voice of the female rancher in Wyngaarden’s installation can be heard while you observe Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s video documentation of his performance and hear his rifle shots blast through copies of Canada’s Indian Act, the extant legislation that proves, through Yuxweluptun’s focused and justified anger, that Canada is not yet post-colonial. Coming from adjacent areas are the underlying murmur of DRIL’s compilation of Hollywood westerns and the rodeo rider’s squeaking, straining leather in Toronto-based Louise Noguchi’s Language of the Rope series, which implies the inherent kinkiness of the rope, saddle and pistol trappings of Wild West shows.

The works in Western exist in a dialogic relationship, communicating with the viewer while interacting with each other to create a multi-voiced chorus that challenges tired myths.