Media Release

For immediate release
January 19, 2005

Aboriginal writer and artist debate identity, idealism at the Walter Phillips Gallery

Kent Monkman • Paul Chaat Smith, January 26 to March 2
PLAN B, The Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre
Free, Wednesdays through Sundays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Thursdays to 9 p.m.
Opening reception: Thursday, January 26, 7 p.m.

Inspired by the idyllic landscapes of Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, the work of Kent Monkman transplants a set of allegorical, satirical, narrative characters into the vast gorges and soaring, forested cliffs of Cole-like scenes. In the upcoming exhibition in the Walter Phillips Gallery’s new PLAN B curatorial space, acclaimed Comanche writer and curator Paul Chaat Smith will respond to three large-scale canvases by Monkman, work titled The Trilogy of St. Thomas.

“I pillage the history of painting, from the Baroque era to Romanticism, to investigate and challenge the subjectivity of the European eye on Aboriginal peoples and the ‘New World’,” Monkman says of his work. He paints himself into many of his works, in the form of a drag alter ego, and the narratives in his paintings are complex discussions of cultural conflict that isn’t just about race.

An artist of Cree ancestry, Monkman works in painting, film/video, and performance, and has participated in group shows at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, England, and his work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Museum London, the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ontario, the Indian Art Centre in Ottawa, The Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, and the Canada Council Art Bank.

Responding to The Trilogy of St. Thomas in the form of a letter, writer and activist Paul Chaat Smith brings more than 30 years of thinking and writing on contemporary Aboriginal art, identity, mass culture, and politics. The co-author, with Robert Warrior, of Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Smith was active in the American Indian Movement in the 1970s before moving to Washington and leaving the movement. His work came full circle in the mid-1990s with his renewed writing on the American Indian, and his extensive work for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Smith and Monkman make a perfect match. “Within the field, I’m known for my critique of Romanticism from the standpoint of its victims (us), and for being probably the least spiritual Indian writer in print,” Smith has said.

Kent Monkman • Paul Chaat Smith contributes to a series of Aboriginal programming and exhibitions at the Walter Phillips Gallery and Visual Arts at The Banff Centre. The show complements the Gallery’s current main exhibition, Jimmie Durham: Knew Urk, on through March 26, a recent collection of mixed media works that make up Durham’s first exhibition in Canada, and his first solo show in North America in over a decade. The Gallery will host a talk on the American Indian Movement by Paul Chaat Smith on January 25, and a talk on February 16 by artist Lori Blondeau. On February 2, the Gallery will host the launch of the book Transference Tradition Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture with readings by co-editor and contributor Steven Loft, and contributors Candice Hopkins, Victor Masayesva, and Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew.

Print-ready, downloadable images by Kent Monkman:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/media_room/images/wpg/#monkman

For more information on the Walter Phillips Gallery:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/