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From Kent Monkman’s The Emergence of a Legend

What Rosalie Favell makes clear in her curation of Acting Up: Performing the Indian, at PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts until March 4, is that there is an ongoing legacy of silencing and producing stereotypes through photography. In this way, Favell notes, the camera is a tool of oppression: "[…] it has silenced the Aboriginal peoples standing before the camera who have had their own thoughts on their circumstances and perhaps in their own way, wished to convey something beyond those of the needs of the colonizers."
   
Jeff Thomas’ Medicine Crow directly addresses — and even conducts a dialogue with — this history. Appropriating the form of the didactic text panel that often accompanies and explains artifacts, Thomas uses the panel to stage a question-and-answer discussion with the long-deceased Edward S. Curtis, a controversial documentarian of North American Aboriginal tribes in the early 1900s, adding his voice to Curtis’ photograph.
   
Promotional photos of Aboriginal performers from the past inspired Kent Monkman’s The Emergence of a Legend, a series of five black-and-white prints matted on black velvet and displayed in delicate filigreed frames. The luxe style is typical of Monkman, who regularly re-imagines depictions of Aboriginal people, queering history by replacing the beefcake brave or exotic Indian princess with a man in drag. Monkman is creating both a place for himself in this history, as well as opening up the material of history to questioning and speculation.
   
The evidence of photographic decay — dark blooms where the fix has not penetrated or scaly, white areas where the emulsion has peeled off — in Monkman’s faux historical photos have a nice visual resonance with Lori Blondeau’s I Fall to Pieces. A pretty girl, cartoony and larger than life, fills most of this large-scale photograph. Tiny bits of the image are missing — her hair is flecked with white and the end of her nose has disappeared entirely. Eventually, the background of this image asserts itself — it is not white but a pale, mottled orange. It is skin. The hokey and sentimental image of the Indian princess, married with a large rose, is revealed as a tattoo that has deteriorated over the years. It’s a bittersweet record of the transformation that both the tattoo and the artist’s self-image have undergone.
   
Also of note in Acting Up is a video by relative newcomer and local artist Jackie Traverse. Her central image is of herself as an angry, screaming butterfly, flitting around a perfect blue sky where images of missing women appear. Traverse’s potent images are complemented by a raw chorus of wails created by a women’s choir in Vancouver.
   
To triumph over the colonizing influence of the camera, Favell suggests, Aboriginal subjects must assert their identity in ways that confound and overwhelm the intentions and preconceived notions of both the photographer and non-Aboriginal audiences. While many works, such as those of Monkman and Adrian Stimson (aka Buffalo Boy), engage directly with stereotype, others in this eight-person exhibition encourage us to look beyond the image and recognize the thinking, speaking, feeling, political subject.
   
Sandee Moore left the mild climes of her B.C. home for the warm embrace of the Winnipeg arts community six years ago. She is an intermedia artist, a former director of Video Pool and occasional arts writer.

Acting Up: Performing the Indian
Curated by Rosalie Favell
Until March 4, at PLATFORM
Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts (100 Arthur St.)