In the Galleries
Miss Chief Maker
Native artist Kent Monkman takes back history By David Balzer
Kent Monkman’s brave new creative world, at once parodic and exuberant, consists precisely of things that might have held him back. A gay man of Cree, English and Irish ancestry, Monkman embraces and then overturns colonialist aesthetics, from 19th-century landscape painting to silent western films. Even Cher gets it: her Half-Breed-era look is the basis for his drag alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the central figure in many of his performances, films, videos and paintings, and a coy, aggressive subverter of frontier mythology. The Toronto-based artist’s latest series—gorgeous paintings accompanied by a number of installations and videos (the latter projected inside teepees)—makes Miss Chief’s mission grandiosely apparent. Trapper’s Bride shows her mounted on a horse, Pocahontas-like, behind her barebacked, high-Aryan groom. The allusion here, right down to the subject’s name inscribed in stone, is to Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, with the implication that it’s Miss Chief Eagle (i.e., Monkman) who is the new imperialist marauder, staking her rightful claim to the vast, fruitful and long-protected territory of Western art.
The Triumph of Mischief. Artwork not for sale. Nov. 15 to Dec. 30. Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen St. W., 416-395-0067, www.mocca.toronto.on.ca.
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