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The Mustang Suite @ Alternator Gallery The Alternator Gallery |
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The Mustang Suite, an exhibition by Dana Claxton, one of Canada's leading indigenous artists opens Monday, June 9, 2008 at the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art.
Claxton explores ideas about traditional indigenous culture in the context of a contemporary consumer culture in a video and photo-based installation commissioned by the Alternator with funding from the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. She uses the horse, which holds a special place in the plains culture of the Lakota people, as a symbol of indigenous culture, and pays tribute to the horse dance created by a former spiritual leader, Black Elk. Claxton, a Vancouver-based artist who traces her maternal ancestry to the Lakota people who fled to Canada with Sitting Bull after the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, evokes imaginative impressions of horses dancing in a projected one-channel video. The exhibition also includes a suite of five photographs that consider evolving aboriginal identities using consumer items such as the Mustang car and Mustang bikes. "It's about adaptability and how, despite that cliché of indigenous cultures being static, they have always evolved and have had to utilize whatever technology was there," says Claxton. Claxton's work is in numerous public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Mustang Suite is exhibited in conjunction with the national media arts festival, On Common Ground, the largest-ever gathering of media artists in the B.C. Interior. Organized by the Alternator and the Ullus Collective, a group of aboriginal filmmakers based in Penticton, and UBC Okanagan, the June 10 to June 15 festival is part of the biennial conference of the Independent Media Arts Alliance, which serves some 12,000 independent media artists across the country. The Mustang Suite was commissioned with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development and the Audain Foundation. The exhibition runs June 10 to July 31. All are welcome to meet the artist at a free opening reception at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 12. The Alternator is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. The gallery is located in the Rotary Centre for the Arts at 421 Cawston Ave. For information, go to the website below or call (250) 868-2298. |
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 http://www.alternatorgallery.com
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