Dana Claxton
Intimate and expansive forms of portraiture at the Scotiabank Photography Award exhibition.
Dana Claxton, “Lasso,” 2018
LED firebox with transmounted chromogenic transparency (courtesy the artist; collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Audain BC Art Acquisition Fund)
Dana Claxton’s Scotiabank Photography Award exhibition – a component of the annual prize that also includes a a hardcover monograph published by Steidl – opened in Toronto several months after the toppling and removal of the statue of Egerton Ryerson, the namesake of both the university and the gallery. Given Ryerson’s role as superintendent of education in designing the residential “school” system, calls are ongoing to officially rename the university and it is now being called X University by Indigenous students, scholars, artists and allies.
The day I visited, the statue was, of course, gone, but its site adjacent to the gallery’s entrance held the tension of recent protest. The iconic images of its topple came easily to mind, as did unmarked graves at residential schools numbering in the thousands, the egregious lack of drinking water and basic infrastructure in Indigenous communities, and the ongoing work of land defenders at Fairy Creek, Line 3, 1492 Land Back Lane and Wet’suwet’en, among many others. It’s impossible to disentangle X University from issues of citizenship, sovereignty and restitution, but, with all that in mind, Claxton’s photography offers a clarity of vision that is elegant and beautiful, unapologetically so.
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“Scotiabank Photography Award: Dana Claxton,” 2021
installation view showing “Ayuta Najin Ktewin – Kills the Enemy Who Stood Standing – Her Moccasins (My Great-Grandmother)” (left), 1993 (printed 2021), inkjet print (photo ©James Morley, Ryerson Image Centre)
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Dana Claxton, “Ayuta Najin Ktewin – Kills the Enemy Who Stood Standing – Her Moccasins (My Great-Grandmother),” 1993 (printed 2021)
inkjet print (courtesy the artist)
Claxton, based in Vancouver, is a Hunkpapa Lakota photographer and filmmaker who came of age as an artist during a critical moment of Indigenous activism in the early 1990s, and was galvanized by both the Kanesatake Resistance, or Oka crisis, and the violent police and military attacks on Mohawk peoples, and by the teachings of Lakota histories. It was a moment not unlike our current era, when Indigenous land rights were being refused by governments, even as media coverage was becoming widespread. Acts of contestation and protest are never far in Claxton’s work, but it’s the celebration of culture and connection that are her hallmarks. This exhibition is an opportunity to see her expanded forms of portraiture in a focused selection addressing friendship, family, spirituality and land in ways that always foreground beautiful details.
“Scotiabank Photography Award: Dana Claxton,” 2021
installation view (photo ©James Morley, Ryerson Image Centre)
The exhibition, on view until Dec. 4, is divided into three sections and the first room, Land, is quietly stunning. The large Cabri Lake BW Panorama (2000, printed 2021) unfurls across six unframed, overlapping photographs, a commanding depiction of land and sky. The play of texture and light through the grassy hills conveys (even for the uninitiated) an obvious spiritual significance. This is not landscape photography, but a method of bringing artist and viewer in closer relation to land and all it embodies. A triptych of stones, half-hidden in grasses and covered with lichen, is treated with the attention, reverence and detail of a human portrait. It takes a minute for the centre stone to reveal itself as halved, the result of heating and cooling during ceremony, as Claxton discussed in her artist talk. In Lakota culture, stones carry particular and individual character – there are “stones who sing, who fly, who talk, and a stone isn’t just a stone.” This is an elegant portrait, signifying complexity even where the image appears simple.
Dana Claxton, “Stones 2,” 2000 (printed 2021)
inkjet print (courtesy the artist)
Claxton is a master photographer and her curiosity in the medium is format agnostic – there are works shot on 35mm, large-format, iPhone, iPad and disposable cameras. Many are printed from negatives originally exposed in the 1990s and early 2000s, so there is a striking temporality at play: the space between the time of exposure and the time of printing is a decades-long displacement between an event and its permanence.
Process is elsewhere evident in the visible artifacts and markings of film, the Kodak logos and bright graphic notations that frame the images through their own construction. In Ayuta Najin Ktewin – Kills the Enemy Who Stood Standing – Her Moccasins (My Great-Grandmother), (1993, printed 2021), the blocky, colourful film perforations mimic the beadwork on the moccasins, integrating the representational qualities of the object with its qualities as an ancestral portrait.
Dana Claxton, “Paint Up 1,” 2009
lightjet print (courtesy of the artist; collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, purchased with support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program and the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, 2011)
The largest section of the show, Body, continues to address representation through portraiture with images of people, each imposing and monumental in their own way. Paint Up 1 and Paint Up 2 (2009) are larger-than-life portraits of ceremonial dancer Joseph Paul, whose intense gaze seems to move through you, rather than looking at you. At this scale, you see every hair and follicle of his precisely painted face and the expression is relaxed but defiant, seeming to both mock the stoic stereotype and absorb a deep sense of resistance.
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Dana Claxton, “Defiance 2,” 2021
lightjet print on metallic paper (courtesy the artist)
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Dana Claxton, “Study for a Protest 2,” 2021
chromogenic print, installation view (photo ©James Morley, Ryerson Image Centre)
In Study for a Protest 2 (2021), members of the ReMatriate Collective, Jeneen Frei Njootli and Denver Lynxleg, are shown in full length, walking casually with an ease of movement that counters how Indigenous peoples are often depicted by photojournalists covering protests. Defiance 2 (2021) shows the triumphant fist of a high femme warrior, nails painted in red, yellow, black and white, raised in the iconic gesture of protest, conflating beauty, fashion and resistance. In Cultural Belongings (2016), what Claxton calls “made to be readys,” are on full view as her collaborator Samaya Jardey brings along drums, beadwork, purses, elk robe, platform shoes, dance stick and headdress in a bridging of aesthetics – the Lakota nation’s with contemporary art’s – that offers a critical take on conceptual art’s familiar tropes of the large-scale backlit photograph and the Duchampian readymade.
Spending time with these portraits of land, people, objects and ideas feels like being encircled and encompassed by relationships of care, caught in the cross-gazes of generations of artists, activists and knowledge-keepers. It’s work that celebrates the beauty of culture, land and spirit, even as the idea of critically discussing beauty in photography, or art in general, still feels somehow taboo. We can speak of aesthetics or engagement or appeal, but rarely do artists say so straightforwardly that they are interested in beauty, and Claxton is.
Hers is a photography of representation but with an openness that allows viewers a generous space of entry. When Claxton speaks of generosity in her work (which poet Layli Long Soldier articulates in Tribute to Dana Claxton and the Art of Generosity, her contribution to Claxton’s 2018 monograph Fringing the Cube), she is not just speaking of generosity between artistic collaborators, although surely that is part of it, but of a generosity of spirit that welcomes viewers into the conversation. The capacity to create beautiful images that expressively convey ideas both universal and culturally specific, at once political and intimate, is what makes Claxton’s work especially powerful. ■
Scotiabank Photography Award: Dana Claxton at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto from Sept. 15 to Dec. 4, 2021.
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