|
March 2005
 Kent
Monkman (Cree) is visual artist whose work encompasses
painting, filmmaking, set design, and illustration. Monkman founded
the film company Urban Nation with producer Gisele Gordon. His
film Blood River won the Best Film Award at the 2000 ImagineNATIVE
Film Festival in Toronto and his dance video A Nation Is Coming
won Best Experimental and Best Editing awards at the 1997 Alberta
Film and Television Awards. He attended the 1999 Screenwriting
Lab at the Sundance Institute. An accomplished painter, Monkman
has exhibited at many venues, including the Royal Ontario Museum
and the Indian Art Centre. He participated in the Bienal de Poesia
Visual in Mexico City in 1993. In 2004, Monkman received a Visiting
Artist fellowship from NMAI's Native Arts Program, to research
19th-century North American painters who contributed to the paradigm
of the "romantic savage." A member of the Fisher River
Band of northern Manitoba, Monkman lives in Toronto, Ontario.
"In my recent films and paintings, I play with sexuality
and gender to discuss power. I employ the cinematic and painterly
idioms of the nineteenth century, creating narratives with which
to challenge the subjectivity of the original artists, and dismantle
commonly held assumptions regarding Native peoples, history, and
the colonization of our sexualities."
"Under the guise of 'cultural preservation' and 'ethnology',
these contrived romantic images ultimately served a more sinister
agenda of cultural and racial obliteration: if Native people could
be depicted as relics of the past, and romantic casualties of
a dying race, they would be innocuous, irrelevant, and without
a future."
"But we are still here! And we are constantly redefining
ourselves as Native people in a fast-changing world. We cannot
escape history, but we can question the subjectivity of those
who wrote it."
Screened by NMAI
Image credit:
Kent Monkman - courtesy of the filmmaker
|
 |
 |
|
|
