Théâtre de Cristal
Kent Monkman
September 8 - October 4th, 2007
Artists Panel: October 2nd at 7p, Kent Monkman with K.C. Adams and Ryan Rice at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre with reception to follow at the Union Gallery

Kent Monkman, installation view

Kent Monkman is an artist who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance and installation. His recent work facilitates dialogue about colonial power relations using sexuality as a forum to negotiate power. Théâtre de Cristal is a video installation that features the artist’s recent video titled Group of Seven Inches, a naughty and playful musing on the relationship between artist and model.

Group of Seven Inches borrows from the diaries of 19th century painters of “Indians,” George Catlin and Paul Kane, turning their dismissive writings on the “romantic savage” upside down and inside out. Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (the outrageous alter ego of Cree artist Kent Monkman), forces innocent naked white men to become her figure models, seduces them with whiskey, and when she’s done with them, dresses them up as more “authentic” examples of the “European male.”

Shot on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, Group of Seven Inches subverts the subjectivity and authority of colonial art history and everything else it can get its hands on.

Kent Monkman is an artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance and installation. His recent work facilitates dialogue about colonial power relations using sexuality as a forum to negotiate power. He has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Indian Art Centre, and has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, USA, UK, and Mexico, including: “We come in peace…” Histories of the Americas, at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, and The American West, at Compton Verney, in Warwickshire, England. Monkman has created site specific performances at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and at Compton Verney, and has also made super 8 versions of these performances that he calls “Colonial Art Space Interventions”. His award winning short film and video works have been screened at various national and international festivals. His work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Museum London, the Woodland Cultural Centre, the Indian Art Centre, The Mackenzie Art Gallery, and the Canada Council Art Bank.