Shelley Niro

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Shelley Niro, “Toys Aren’t Us – Day at the Beach,” 2017

digital photography, 20” x 24” (courtesy the artist)

Mohawk artist Shelley Niro’s A Good, Long Look exudes big “fun auntie” energy. Humour,  love for family and enthusiastic explorations of history permeate her work. For Niro, who lives in Brantford, Ont., and is a member of the Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Kanien’kehaka Nation from the Six Nations Reserve, photographs and paintings are acts of care that overturn stereotypes, topple racist narratives and memorialize joy. 

Niro’s exhibition, originating at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, where it was shown last summer, is now on view at Regina’s Dunlop Art Gallery. Viewers are invited to experience it in two parts – at the Dunlop’s downtown library venue until March 22, and within the library’s suburban Sherwood Village branch until April 3, where one of the artist’s most playful series, Toys Aren’t Us, is enticing for children.

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Shelley Niro, “Toys Aren’t Us – Then Everyone Got Mad,” 2017

digital photography, 24” x 20” (courtesy the artist)

In these five digital photographs, Niro places vintage caramel-coloured plastic figurines into settings where bare-chested warriors appear simultaneously absurd, heroic and joyous. Niro transforms their aggressive stances into prancing dance steps in Day at the Beach. Bathing beauty statuettes lounge in the foreground of a giddy landscape of rolling greenery under impressionist clouds, inviting viewers to read the posturing of buff plastic warriors in a context of pleasure and leisure. Rather than dismissing these toys as one-sided racist caricatures, she recognizes the beauty and detail the original sculptor lavished on each tiny face and muscled form, knowing only a new narrative was needed.

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Shelley Niro, “The Grand Behind Glenhyrst,” 2021

oil on canvas, triptych, each 60” x 48” (courtesy of the artist)

Other works offer beauty in traditional ways. Hung in front of a gallery window, a panel from Niro’s Sketches series is a canny echo of the transparent glass pane ­– Mylar drenched in India ink offers a pleasing view of a hill covered in luminescent trees. Meanwhile, at the central venue, a companion panel from Sketches, depicting a lone pine that could have come from the sketchbook of Arthur Lismer or A.J. Casson, hangs in the windowed front wall. While this piece bridges the two exhibition venues, the central gallery offers the more unflinching photo-based work for which Niro, a winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, is known.

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Shelly Niro, “In Her Lifetime 6,” 1990, (2021 reprint)

digital photography, 40” x 60” (courtesy of the artist)

Niro visually conveys the continued relevance of her 1990 series, In Her Lifetime, which includes the text, “Native issues would never be solved in her lifetime,” by enlarging the original eight- by 10-inch black-and-white photographs to span an entire wall. A woman, one of Niro’s sisters, throws back her wind-tossed curls. Her mouth stretches into a broad smile, and her eyes are closed in gleeful abandon. In the following photograph, she stares into the distance. In the central print, she swivels her head, levelling her gaze at the viewer. The woman’s head bobs from print to print before an expanse of water, floating through rising and falling emotions and the internal narrative typewritten in a corner of each print. In the following prints, the poses are reversed so the last image replicates the first. The cyclical visual rhythm of In Her Lifetime is unequivocal: Indigenous people are in the same position as they were 30 years ago, when this work was created. 

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Shelley Niro, “Chiquita 1,” 2021

digital photography, 40” x 40” (courtesy of the artist)

Niro’s mother, Chiquita, appears in photographs and paintings throughout the exhibition, all sourced from the same snapshot, taken when she was 15. Her shoulders are hunched protectively, as she takes a step into womanhood. Niro protects and venerates Chiquita’s vulnerability. In two paintings, she enfolds her within the sheltering arcs of a canoe. It reads not as transportation but as a womb. In several photocollages, she invites viewers to cherish her mother, presenting Chiquita as a glowing Madonna emerging from a luminous halo of rose petals. 

Viewing A Good, Long Look is to experience empathy for Niro’s subjects – be they family members, the land or old toys. And she encourages other artists to tell their stories. “You have to get your message out there,” she said during her artist talk. “All our stories aren’t told. We need to tell them.” Indeed, each of Niro’s photographs and paintings tells a story, perhaps one we haven’t heard before. She asks viewers to forget what they think they have learned about Indigenous people from popular culture and embrace the possibilities of new narratives. ■

Shelley Niro: A Good, Long Look at the Dunlop Art Gallery from Jan. 22 to March 22, 2022, and at the Sherwood Village branch from Jan. 15 to April 3, 2022.

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