Dana Claxton obtained this 12 months’s Audain Prize, one in every of Canada’s most coveted arts awards, throughout a ceremony on Monday (25 September). The C$100,000 ($74,000) money prize honouring distinguished British Columbia-based artists was introduced at a luncheon on the Fairmont Lodge Vancouver.
When Reid Shier, government director of the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, awarded the prize on behalf of the jury, he praised Claxton’s “multifaceted” observe—describing it as “as a lot [Jack] Kerouac as [Eugène] Atget”—and spoke of her “landmark” works as a First Nations lady—a gaggle who’re “systematically denied a spot within the artwork world.”
Claxton, a Vancouver-based artist whose work spans movie, pictures, video and multi-channel set up, is a member of the Wooden Mountain Lakota First Nations positioned in Southwest Saskatchewan. Her observe investigates Indigenous magnificence, the physique, the socio-political and the non secular and has been extensively exhibited throughout Canada and internationally. She can also be a professor on the College of British Columbia (UBC) and head of its division of artwork historical past, visible artwork and idea.
Dana Claxton, The Mustang Suite: Daddy’s Gotta New Experience, 2008 Courtesy the artist
In an announcement, Claxton famous the Audain Prize’s historical past of acknowledging First Nations artists, saying, “It’s a nice honour to be included with this group, which incorporates esteemed BC artists like Susan Level, Jim Hart and Robert Davidson, all who’ve received the Audain Prize.” In a video performed on the occasion, she spoke of the continued “criminalisation of Native tradition”, saying that her work was finally about “not dehumanising folks”.
A previous recipient of the Governor Normal’s Award in Visible and Media Arts in 2020, she had a solo survey exhibition, Fringing the Dice, on the Vancouver Artwork Gallery in 2018 and her sequence Headdress (2018-19) had its debut on the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Artwork in 2019.
“Apart from having an excellent worldwide popularity, Ms. Claxton has had a substantial affect on youthful artists and her UBC artwork college students,” says Michael Audain, the chairman of the Audain Basis, who based the award in 2004.
Dana Claxton, Buffalo Bone China, efficiency at AKA artist-run centre, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1997. Courtesy of AKA and the artist.
Claxton is understood for her video work like 1997’s Buffalo Bone China, evoking the animals’ slaughter for a European luxurious merchandise through mesmeric pixelated loops of phantom buffalo working by means of the plains, a white hunter capturing them and a local man alternately crying in ache and caressing tremendous bone china. Efficiency artwork can also be a pillar of her work, like 2011’s The Elsewhere—an try to “Indianise house” by means of the usage of gesture, music, and pure and man-made objects—which includes components of Lakota ceremony. Her photographic work, like 2008’s Mustang Suite, employs ironic humour to defy stereotyped imagery of First Nations. As Shier put it, her work performs a “essential reversal” of “who is perhaps whom”.
In an interview with The Artwork Newspaper, Claxton cites a wide range of influences together with the multi-disciplinary artist Paul Wong and her expertise within the early Nineties at Vancouver’s Video Inn media arts centre, to the Vancouver College and photo-conceptualists like Jeff Wall, First Nations filmmaker Loretta Todd, in addition to her circle of relatives and Lakota traditions.
Dana Claxton, Headdress – Dana, 2019 Courtesy the artist
Vancouver’s simultaneous cultures of “artist-run centres and artist-as-curator” she says, in addition to its “massive indigenous contingency of cultural producers and picture makers”, had been formative influences. “It feels fantastic to win this award,” she provides. “It’s an honour, a privilege and an actual blessing.”
Previous winners of the Audain Prize have included the photo-conceptualist Ian Wallace, in 2022; and sculptor James Hart, the hereditary chief of the Eagle Clan of the Haida Nation, in 2021.
