A monumental retrospective of the Six Nations’ artist’s work is now showing at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa
In a series of 1998 photographic prints featuring the Statue of Liberty and colourful Indigenous beadwork, Mohawk artist Shelley Niro adds text that begins: “In my culture/there are no monuments/no man made structures/no tourist sites/one visits/burns tobacco/says a prayer.”
The art is big and there’s a lot of it. Either Niro is working at scale, creating canvases the size of classic European history paintings, or she is working with quantity, producing both painted and photographic series that riff on a theme or an image multiple times. Sometimes she is doing both. If the piece impresses as something more than a punch line, it’s because of the scale at which Niro has executed it, and the detail with which she has costumed and posed her two subjects, bookending them with views of the empty landscape behind them.
How are we to fix what has happened since? In a catalogue essay, Hamilton curator and artist Bryce Kanbara quotes activist Pamela Palmeter: “I never talk about reconciliation without talking about truth, justice and reconciliation. You won’t get that from hanging artwork in an office.” And then he writes, “We know what she means, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the persuasive impact art …”
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