ABOUT THE SHOW / WORKS AVAILABLE / LINKS /
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ABOUT THE SHOW
Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to a series of video works which augment the depth of theme and persona in Monkman's representations of indigenous roles across several colonialist ages. These "video paintings" incorporate performance, storytelling, and art-historical innuendo - with painted backgrounds where live-action characters interact and exist indefinitely.
In his series of four video paintings, Kent Monkman explores historical precedents and themes of First Nations peoples in Europe. Since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, Indigenous peoples traveled to Europe as embassadors for their own people, captives, performers and as specimens for human zoos, popular in the 19th century. Both Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and George Catlin’s Gallery of the North American Indian featured Native American performers. Monkman constructs a back story for Miss Chief who began her own career as an artist and performer with her nemesis George Catlin before launching her own Taxonomy of the European Male. The Emergence of Legend photo series touches on this mythology.
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Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. He has had solo exhibitions in numerous Canadian museums including the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He has participated in various international group exhibitions including: The American West, at Compton Verney, in Warwickshire, England, Remember Humanity at Witte de With, Rotterdam, the 2010 Sydney Biennale, and Oh Canada!, MASS MOCA. The Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart in France presented his first solo Museum exhibition in Europe in 2014. Kent has worked for the last two years on Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience a major touring exhibition which started at the University of Toronto Art Museum. Currently also on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery are the works of his Four Continents shown together for the first time. His work is represented in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Denver Art Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, la Fondation de la Maison Rouge (Paris), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, Rideau Hall, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Claridge, BMO Financial Group and the RBC Art Collection.
WORKS
(click on images below for larger view, please ensure browser pop-up blockers are disabled)
VIDEOS
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LINKS
- Kent Monkman's website
- Kent Monkman's page on the PFOAC website
- Click here to download the artist's recent C.V.
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