Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube

(Hardback)

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Known for her expansive multidisciplinary approach to art making Vancouver-based Dana Claxton, who is Hunkpapa Lakota (Sioux), has investigated notions of Indigenous identity, beauty, gender and the body, as well as broader social and political issues through a practice which encompasses photography, film, video and performance. Rooted in contemporary art strategies, her practice critiques the representations of Indigenous people that circulate in art, literature and popular culture in general. In doing so, Claxton regularly combines Lakota traditions with "Western" influences, using a powerful and emotive "mix, meld and mash" approach to address the oppressive legacies of colonialism and to articulate Indigenous world views, histories and spirituality.

This timely catalogue will be the first monograph to examine the full breadth and scope of Claxton's practice. It will be extensively illustrated and will include essays by Claxton's colleague Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia; Monika Kin Gagnon, Professor in the Communications Department at Concordia University, who has followed Claxton's work for 25 years; Olivia Michiko Gagnon, a New Yorkbased scholar and doctoral student in Performance Studies; and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Author Bio

Grant Arnold is the Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery where he contributes to the gallerys exhibition and collecting programs. Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She has published widely on cultural politics and the visual and media arts since the 1980s. She is the author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000), and co-editor of the anthology Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2014). Olivia Gagnon is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies (NYU), where her work explores the intersections of feminism, archival discourses, performance, and theories of affect, embodiment and sense. Jaleh Mansoor is a historian of modern and contemporary cultural production. She is the author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010). Mansoor teaches in the faculty of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.