Kent Monkman

Kent Monkman (born in 1965) is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree and Irish ancestry. He is a member of the Fish River band situated in Northern Manitoba. He is both a visual as well as performance artist, working in a variety of mediums such as painting, film/video, and installation. He has had many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in Canada, the US, and Europe. He has achieved international recognition for his colourful and richly detailed combining of disparate genre conventions and also for his clever recasting of historical narrative.

Monkman has attended various Canadian and US institutions, including the Banff Centre, the Sundance Institute in Los Angeles and the Canadian Screen Training Institute , and he graduated from Toronto's Sheridan College in 1989(Canadian Art). Monkman currently lives and works in Toronto.

Monkman's work "convey[s] a deep understanding of oppression and the mechanisms at work in dominant ideology" by targeting modes of hierarchies and colonized sexuality within his artistic practice. Through his use of mimicry, Monkman subverts and de-centers the Western Gaze; he makes audiences aware that “you've been looking at us [but] we've also been looking at you". In his paintings and performances he appropriates classical 19th century landscapes, speaking to the appropriation and assimilation of Native American culture by colonial settlers. He targets both the Native American communities and Euro American communities impacted by colonialism, generally playing with role reversal to do so. Some of the binary topics he tackles are "artist and model, colonial explorer and colonized subject, gazer and gazed upon, male and female, straight and queer, past and present, real and imaginary". "Resistance, adaptation, and hybridity all feature strongly in Monkman's work".

Monkman's work often references and reconfigures forms from 19th Century White American painters, particularly George Catlin and the Western landscape painters. For example, his 2006 Trappers of Men takes an 1868 landscape by Albert Bierstadt, but portrays the scene at midday – rejecting Bierstadt's sunset original – and replaces Bierstadt's animals with perplexed White individuals from American art and political history, a Lakota historian, and Monkman's drag alter-ego.

Since Monkman uses the colonizers' own methodologies by use of language and imagery, "by choosing to speak, Monkman chooses to participate in using the Master's language, but his speech subverts rather than upholds the paradigm of oppression". "The artist uses close re-creation of earlier artworks as an opportunity for ironic, often humorous representation of historical attitudes towards First Nations culture, attitudes that persist today". He is criticized for using mimicry within his painting practise, this method of subversion requires him to still participate within an imperialist discourse as opposed to his performance practise which is considered to be more successful, but he “effect[s] change on a systematic level, to change the signification of the language of oppression, even the minority artist must appeal to a mainstream audience”. "Monkman's work might be considered controversial to some, especially in Alberta, where traditional images of the Old West are held near and dear to the heart, but Monkman hopes it helps Albertans see historic representations of colonization under a new light".

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Wikipedia