Kent Monkman
The Artist as Hunter
June 27–September 21, 2014
Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart
87 600, Rochechouart
France
Hours: Wednesday–Monday 10am–12:30pm / 1:30–6pm
T + 33 (0) 5 55 03 77 77
contact.musee [at] cg87.fr
This summer, Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art has invited Canadian artist Kent Monkman (b. 1965) to give what will be his first solo museum exhibition in Europe. Monkman’s Cree Indian roots inform a multi-disciplinary practice which encompasses performance, video, large-scale and sometimes musical installations, re-vamped versions of historical painting and new takes on early photography. In the guise of his unbridled and eccentric alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the artist uses poetry and humour to appropriate and refashion preconceived colonial ideas of American Indian culture and in the process, produces a body of work that constantly examines issues related to difference.
Kent Monkman: The Artist as Hunter particularly focuses on questions of identity and challenges to power structures, both key elements of Monkman’s art. Included are a set of paintings as well as photographs, prints, films and several installations, one of which is a diorama. They are to be displayed throughout Rochechouart castle, occupying areas such as the castle tower or the Hunt Gallery, where 16th-century wall paintings of a stag hunt echo the political and belligerent dimension of Monkman’s own productions. In the tower gallery, Monkman turns traditional roles on their head, Indians scrutinizing Westerners as ethnic subjects worthy of study. Through parody, Miss Chief undermines the myths of the Wild West and reminds us that we are all part of someone else’s folklore. An installation combining music and dance sited in the wooden-beamed top-floor castle gallery space conjures up a traditional Native Indian “berdache” (Two-Spirit) ceremony. Such two-spirit people were revered members of the tribe who displayed an amalgam of male and female traits. Their existence astonished and appalled many early explorers of Western America, such as the painter George Catlin.
Kent Monkman belongs to a generation that has found pathways to reconcile living as a Native Indian in a modern culture, in his case through a novel and unexpected mix of theatricality and tragicomedy. He uses his flamboyant alter ego as a means to deconstruct conventional versions of historical events and introduces a note of irony that undermines presumptions about political, national and sexual identity. “I created Miss Chief to represent a person of the third gender. She is an empowered and outrageous diva who drop-kicks the colonial experience in her 7″ stiletto moccasins. I created her as an artist, and reinstated her in the landscapes of the nineteenth century to not only reverse the gaze, but to challenge the balance of power. As an artist, she has come to life in various guises, often straddling a place between performance diva and a supernatural spirit or trickster.” Playing with historical metaphors is a ploy that goes beyond just questioning a post-colonial society. It is acutely concerned with the contemporary reality of hybridising cultures in our present global economy.
Based in Toronto, Kent Monkman has exhibited widely, with work shown at The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Ontario Art Gallery (AGO) in Toronto, at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver Art Museum and at the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Museum) in Washington. He has also exhibited works at events such as the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010. This summer he is scheduled to take part in Unsettled Landscapes at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico. Recent appearances (2011–12) in France include My Winnipeg at la maison rouge (Paris).
Sleeping Beauty
Works from the Collection
March 1–September 21
Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art houses a rich collection of contemporary art and the present re-hang privileges works that involve plant life, have nocturnal connotations or an aura of mystery about them.
With works from Stephan Balkenhol, Robert Combas, Maggy Cluzeau and Julien Dubuisson, Glenda León, Rodney Graham, Laurent Montaron, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Tremblay, and Jordan Wolfson
Raoul Hausmann
Sounds and Visions
Selection from the Raoul Hausmann Collection
March 1–September 21
Selections from the Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art’s Raoul Hausmann archives are on permanent display in the museum. Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), founder of Berlin Dada, moved to the local area after the Second World War and never ceased to experiment with collage and sound poetry, seeking connections between sounds and images, between words and shapes.
