Meryl McMaster: Confluence
to
Glenbow Museum 130 9 Ave SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0P3
Meryl McMaster, "Time's Gravity," 2015
photograph, courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art.
Curated by Heather AndersonProduced by Carleton University Art Gallery
Meryl McMaster has been garnering praise across Canada for her explorations of identity, representation, storytelling, and the environment through photographic self-portraiture.
McMaster’s potent, mysterious photographs explore the fluid domain of identity, and the possibilities for examining and revisioning the self and its representation. Placing her body centrally in front of the camera, McMaster transforms her appearance, whether by layering photographic images onto her body or through elaborate costumes and props she creates and inhabits as alter egos, solitary in the landscape.
An individual of Plains Cree and Euro-Canadian heritage, McMaster explores the dimensions of her own sense of identity, and the complex history of the photographic representation of Indigenous peoples. The three bodies of work in Confluence comprise arresting self-portraits that counter the stereotypical ways that Indigenous peoples have been, and sometimes still are, represented within a colonial framework, principally as objects rather than as subjects of the gaze.