Dana Claxton (b.1959)
Born 1959, Yorkton, Saskatchewan
Lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia
PLATFORM 28: Lasso, 2018/2021
Digital print on billboard fabric, steel
10 x 20 feet
Courtesy of the Artist
Dana Claxton works across film, video, photography, and performance art to explore “indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual.” With sly humor and references from film and television, she subverts oppressive stereotypes of Native people and confronts how they perpetuate the violence of colonization. Emphasizing Indigenous survival, Claxton frequently pictures herself, friends, and colleagues in her work and styles them in clothing and designs integral to Lakota Sioux culture.
Lasso shows her subject, the Blackfoot filmmaker Cowboy Smithx, casting out a fantastically long and looping lasso. In a striking fringed jacket, velour tracksuit, and embellished parfleche basket, his clothing melds hip hop fashion, stereotypical signifiers of “Cowboys and Indians,” and traditional Native beadwork. Claxton wanted to “collapse images that might consider what an Indigenous male is, in the past, in the imaginary, in the present and in the future.” Claxton furthers this by including a Mustang brand bicycle beside Cowboy Smithx. The bike is emblematic of 1950s Americana culture and, through its title, recalls the breed of wild horses brought by Spanish colonizers to the American West.
Dana Claxton was born in 1959 in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. She is an enrolled member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan. Claxton earned her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University in 2007. Her work has been shown internationally, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and many more venues. She has received awards such as the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020) and Scotiabank Photography Award (2020). She currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC and is a Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.
Claxton’s commission is connected to Jeffrey Gibson’s Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, opening in early June 2021. Gibson invited Claxton and fellow Indigenous artists to perform and create new artwork on and around this installation.
