Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube

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Dana Claxton, “Cultural Belongings,” 2016

LED firebox with transmounted chromogenic transparency (collection of Rosalind and Amir Adnani)

Some may have read Dana Claxton’s fashion stories in Details, a onetime American lifestyle magazine. Others may have heard her poems at Vancouver’s old Pitt gallery or seen the shows she directed for CBC Television and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.

But Claxton is best known for ambitious multidisciplinary art projects that use film, video, photography, installation and performance to decry the oppressive legacy of colonialism and reclaim Indigenous culture.

Now, the Vancouver Art Gallery is celebrating the 30-year career of Claxton, a Vancouver-based Hunkpapa Lakota whose ancestors followed Sitting Bull north when he fled the United States in the 1800s and eventually settled in southern Saskatchewan.

It’s Claxton’s first career survey and the title, Fringing the Cube, is a reference to her efforts to create space for Indigenous identity in art institutions. Fringes on traditional clothing worn on the Great Plains not only dispersed rain, but caught the wind and reminded people of their immediate environment.

The range of work is broad. One of Claxton’s most recent projects includes images of Indigenous ironworkers who help erect structures like skyscrapers and bridges. The pictures, displayed in lightboxes, which Claxton calls “fireboxes,” include NDN Ironworkers and NDN Ironworker (Warrior of …), both made in 2018. (NDN, a shorthand spelling for Indian, is used by some Indigenous people to refer to themselves.) It’s arduous and dangerous work, often on narrow beams high above the ground, but it pays well and provides a sense of pride, confidence and autonomy. Claxton’s images capture the well-deserved swagger.

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Dana Claxton, “Tatanka (Buffalo)” from the series “Indian Candy," 2013

chromogenic print mounted on aluminum (on loan from Mary Wesik)

In other work, Claxton co-opts negative portrayals of Indigenous people in settler culture. In the series, Indian Candy, for instance, she appropriates imagery she found searching the words “Wild West” in Google. She alters each image with washes of intense confectionary colours, like pink and turquoise. The startling colours disrupt the older visual language, says curator Grant Arnold, allowing Claxton to symbolically redress wrongs.

To be sure, there’s plenty of anger in the show. Claxton, in her 1994 film I Want to Know Why, tells how her great-grandmother, starving and exhausted, walked to Canada with Sitting Bull to escape persecution by the American government. She growls in anger and anguish: “And I want to know why.” Claxton also tells of the premature deaths of her grandmother and mother, and demands again to know why.

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Dana Claxton, “Momma Has a Pony Girl ... (Named History and Sets her Free)” from “The Mustang Suite," 2008

chromogenic print (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 2009)

But along with these painful emotions, the show also offers beauty. Rattle, a four-channel video installation from 2003, evokes the healing qualities of Lakota spirituality with its soundtrack of a rattle, a traditional emblem of healing, as well as peyote songs mixed with electronic music. A contemplative work that acts as a prayer, it defies anyone to leave unmoved. ■

Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from Oct. 27, 2018 to Feb. 3, 2019.