2023
Acrylic paint, gesso, MDF panel, plywood, moss, plastic furniture, artificial plants
69” x 84” x 64”
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2023
Acrylic paint, gesso, MDF panel, plywood, moss, plastic furniture, artificial plants
69” x 84” x 64”
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2023
Acrylic paint, gesso, MDF panel, plywood, moss, plastic furniture, artificial plants
69” x 84” x 64”
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2023
Acrylic paint, gesso, MDF panel, plywood, moss, plastic furniture, artificial plants
69” x 84” x 64”
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2023
Acrylic paint, gesso, MDF panel, plywood, moss, plastic furniture, artificial plants
69” x 84” x 64”
2015
Mixed Media Installation
Gardiner Museum
Photo of the installation at Gardiner Museum by Jimmy Limit
Collection of Glenbow Museum
2015
Mixed Media Installation
Photo of the installation at Gardiner Museum by Jimmy Limit
Collection of Glenbow Museum
2015
Mixed Media Installation
Photo of the installation at Gardiner Museum by Jimmy Limit
Collection of Glenbow Museum
2015
Mixed Media Installation
Photo of the installation at Gardiner Museum by Jimmy Limit
Collection of Glenbow Museum
2015
Mixed Media Installation
Photo of the installation at BMO Project Room by Tony Hafkenscheid
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada
casualtiesofmodernity.com
2015
Mixed Media Installation
Photo of the installation at BMO Project Room by Tony Hafkenscheid
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada
casualtiesofmodernity.com
2014
Painted backdrop (acrylic on canvas)
Sculptural installation (mixed media)
192” x 192” x 120”
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2014
Painted backdrop (acrylic on canvas)
Sculptural installation (mixed media)
192” x 192” x 120”
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2012
Multi Media Installation
Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum
Lot’s Wife, invoking the Biblical story of the woman who, despite divine threat of reprisal, turned back in her leave-taking for a final glance at Sodom, her former home. For her defiance, God turned her to a pillar of salt.
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2012
Multi Media Installation
Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum
Lot’s Wife, invoking the Biblical story of the woman who, despite divine threat of reprisal, turned back in her leave-taking for a final glance at Sodom, her former home. For her defiance, God turned her to a pillar of salt.
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2012
Multi Media Installation
Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum
Lot’s Wife, invoking the Biblical story of the woman who, despite divine threat of reprisal, turned back in her leave-taking for a final glance at Sodom, her former home. For her defiance, God turned her to a pillar of salt.
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2012
Multi Media Installation
Based on similarities found between fictitious American and German buddy characters, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, and Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, this multi media installation explores male warrior/lover relationships found in the Greek myths of Achilles and Patrocles and Apollo and Hyacinthus.
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2012
Multi Media Installation
Based on similarities found between fictitious American and German buddy characters, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, and Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, this multi media installation explores male warrior/lover relationships found in the Greek myths of Achilles and Patrocles and Apollo and Hyacinthus.
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2012
Multi Media Installation
Based on similarities found between fictitious American and German buddy characters, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, and Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, this multi media installation explores male warrior/lover relationships found in the Greek myths of Achilles and Patrocles and Apollo and Hyacinthus.
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2011 October 28-31st
Toronto International Art Fair
Dimensions variable
Thank you to Art Toronto, Pierre-Francois Ouelette Art Contemporain, Caviar20, and Ryerson Image Centre
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2011 October 28-31st
Toronto International Art Fair
Dimensions variable
Dispersed throughout the maze are four “dioramas”, in the form of four small rooms, each one presenting the four key players in the Art Game: artist, curator/museum director, gallerist, and collector.
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2011 October 28-31st
Toronto International Art Fair
Dimensions variable
The meandering corridors are made more confusing with the use of double-sided mirrors, trick windows, and fake doors, forcing the audience into a challenging experience of disorientation and multiple choice – not unlike the real art world.
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2011 October 28-31st
Toronto International Art Fair
Dimensions variable
Curated by Steven Loft, The Art Game is a life-size maze, constructed from booth walls identical to the Art Fair itself, takes the audience through an art world “funhouse.”
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2011
Life sized mannequin, antique furniture, paint, wallpaper, wood, taxidermied animals, audio
Dimensions approx. 21' x 14' x 16'
In a life-size museum diorama, the artist's alter ego Miss Chief, appears simultaneously in the past, present, and future as an aging diva alone in her Parisian apartment listening repeatedly to her one "hit" record - Dance to Miss Chief. Overcome with nostalgia, tears well up as she gazes longingly through a window at a sublime landscape - the trackless forests of her nubile youth but a distant memory.
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2011
Life sized mannequin, antique furniture, paint, wallpaper, wood, taxidermied animals, audio
Dimensions approx. 21' x 14' x 16'
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2011
Life sized mannequin, antique furniture, paint, wallpaper, wood, taxidermied animals, audio
Dimensions approx. 21' x 14' x 16'
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2011
Life sized mannequin, antique furniture, paint, wallpaper, wood, taxidermied animals, audio
Dimensions approx. 21' x 14' x 16'
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
The Atelier offers a glimpse into the creative process of contemporary artist Kent Monkman. Employing the idiom of the museum diorama, a section of the gallery is transformed into the corner of an artist's studio, complete with furniture, studies, drawings, reference materials, etchings, and artist's materials.
Over the past decade, Monkman's work has referenced classical traditions of art history, often quoting European artists from the 19th century whose subjects were indigenous people of North America.
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
With the help of his two-spirited alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman has reversed the gaze, turning the European Male into the subject, to challenge received notions of truth in art history, and current museological representations of First Nations cultures.
The setting of The Atelier, with antique furniture and vintage wallpaper captures the historical flavour of the 19th century, but as in the rest of Monkman's work, plays fast and loose with anachronisms, fact and fiction, and complicates ideas of what is authentic and historically correct.
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
Recently, Monkman has leveled his aim at the Western novels of 19th century German novelist Karl May, and the "Sauerkraut Westerns" inspired by his fictitious "Indian" hero Winnetou. May's novels spawned a fascination with Native American cultures in generations of Germans and Eastern Europeans that persist today in many forms including Indian Camps, where Europeans dress up, and play Indian during their summer vacations.
Dance to Miss Chief (2010), screening as part ofThe Atelier exhibition, uses the idiom of the music video to remix footage from German Westerns and from Monkman's seminal multi-channel video installation, Dance to the Berdashe (2008).
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
My Treaty is With the Crown transforms the gallery into a camp of military tents in which the new “Canada” that emerges in the decisive battle of the Plains of Abraham between the British and the French armies (General Wolfe and Montcalm) is invaded by the presence of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s alter ego.
Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University
Photo credit: Paul Litherland
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
Hair as a symbol of power and its removal, as an act of humiliation and domination, is the thematic thread that runs through the environment created by the artist. The biblical allegory of Delilah’s betrayal of Samson is linked to the French battle with the English Crown, Miss Chief addresses the relationship of betrayal and treatment aboriginals have had with European colonizers.
Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University
Photo credit: Paul Litherland
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University
Photo credit: Paul Smith
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2011
Mixed Media Installation
Installed dimensions vary
Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University
Photo credit: Paul Litherland
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2008
Five-channel video installation
Dance to the Berdashe was inspired by a canvas of the same title by the American painter George Catlin (1796-1872) depicting a dance common among the Sauk and Fox nations, of warriors dancing around a Berdashe, visibly joyful and excited. In his memoirs, published in 1844, From Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians, Catlin speaks of this ritual unsympathetically: “One of the most unaccountable and disgusting customs that I have ever met in the Indian country...and where I should wish that it might be extinguished before it be more fully recorded.”
Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Christine Guest
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2008
Five-channel video installation
This video installation, composed of five large projections, offers a contemporary re-interpretation of a traditional Aboriginal ritual featuring the Berdashe, that special male figure whose gender-bending behaviour and very existence astonished and appalled many explorers of the American West.
Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Christine Guest
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2008
Five-channel video installation
The Monkmanian version of this scene, displayed on five screens in the shape of buffalo hides, shows Miss Chief Eagle Testickle dancing the role of the Berdashe. The choreography, created by Canadian Cree actor, choreographer and dancer Michael Greyeyes, is based on both the traditional powwow and contemporary dance. The music, written by Toronto composer Phil Strong, is a free syncopated version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a modern masterpiece also inspired by ancient tribal rituals.
Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Christine Guest
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2008
Five-channel video installation
The critic Barry Ace has written, “It is interesting to note that one of Catlin’s least regarded and perhaps more controversial image[s] would become one of [the] more meaningful works, despite being trapped for more than a century in monolithic stasis. Monkman has clearly released the spirit and intent of the dance, giving it new life.”
Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Christine Guest
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2008
Five-channel video installation
Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Christine Guest
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2007
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada
In Boudoir de Berdashe, Kent Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, invites an audience to repose in her lavish quarters. Inside the velvet-lined tipi Victorian furniture, birch bark Louis Vuitton suitcases, a chandelier, a Hudson Bay blanket and a pair of her beaded platform moccasins, give guests entry into a personal space the Berdashe seems to have momentarily left behind. She is a storyteller and entertainer, and despite her absence, offers to her audience Shooting Geronimo, a silent film in which she stars as an androgynous and glamorous trickster. The film is viewed in stereo as a two-channel rear screen video projection on two of the tipi’s thirteen panels.
Photo by Edward Kowal
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2007
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the National Gallery of Canada
In Boudoir de Berdashe, Kent Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, invites an audience to repose in her lavish quarters. Inside the velvet-lined tipi Victorian furniture, birch bark Louis Vuitton suitcases, a chandelier, a Hudson Bay blanket and a pair of her beaded platform moccasins, give guests entry into a personal space the Berdashe seems to have momentarily left behind. She is a storyteller and entertainer, and despite her absence, offers to her audience Shooting Geronimo, a silent film in which she stars as an androgynous and glamorous trickster. The film is viewed in stereo as a two-channel rear screen video projection on two of the tipi’s thirteen panels.
Photo by Walter Willems
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Installation — 2006
Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World
Art Gallery of Ontario
Monkman draws on the facts of these events to create a screening gallery of his own, a turn-of-the-century movie theatre that intends to shock and entertain, just as Catlin did. The tipi-come-cinema lures its audience with a sophisticated appeal; inside a chandelier hangs amongst sweeping drapery in a soft glow of light and, on the floor, a stretched (simulated) buffalo hide plays two movies, Group of Seven Inches and Robin’s Hood.
Photo by John Goldstein
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2006
Mixed Media Installation
Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World
Art Gallery of Ontario
In 1895, the Lumières brothers’ Cinematographe, the world’s first movie projector, was first used for public film screenings in Paris at Salon Indien. Fifty-six years prior, George Catlin launched his Gallery of the North American Indian at Egyptian Hall in London: a tour he conducted through Europe with a live troupe of ”authentic“ Aboriginal people, a full scale Crow tipi and a vast collection of Aboriginal paraphernalia. Catlin’s ‘Indians’ performed ceremonial dances, and enacted various tableaux vivants furnishing him with a traveling circus that gave Europe a showcase of the “curious” but “dying” breed.
Photo: John Goldstein
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2007
Mixed Media Installation
Shapeshifters, Timetravellers, Storytellers
Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum
Installation view: Beaded Moccasins, Dreamcatcher Bra, Raccoon Jockstrap, and Louis Vuitton Quiver.
Photo: Brian Boyle
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2007
Mixed Media Installation
The Triumph of Mischief
Touring exhibition
Tall Tails is an installation with sound (music) that references Monkman’s performance work. Fashion, as a signifier of cultural change, is a recurring theme Monkman explores in various media. The costume on the mannequin is one of three successively larger and more outlandish headresses worn by Monkman (as Miss Chief) during the performance Séance.
Right-click to download ’Dance to Miss Chief (Dwayne Minard Cellout Remix).mp3‘
Photo: Walter Willems
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2006
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart
The Théâtre de Cristal is what Monkman refers to as the champagne of tipis, the title recalls Cristal Champagne and, as insinuated, it effervesces with sparkle and elegance.
Photo by Guy L’Heureux
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2006
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart
In over 150 North American Indigenous cultures, the Berdashe was an accepted and often celebrated member of the tribe. Although the tradition has not been well documented (it is certain that in the case of George Catlin the lack of representation was deliberate), knowledge of its presence reveals a more complex understanding of Indigenous and sexual identities.
Photo by Don Hall
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2006
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart
The persona of Miss Chief challenges the authoritative version of history by playing the starring role in “period” photographs, romantic paintings and silent era films such as Group of Seven Inches and Robin’s Hood. Through this re-imaging of history, missing narratives are explored as Miss Chief subverts the authority of the artists who created images of Indigenous people in the 19th century.
Photo by Walter Willems
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2006
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart
In Group of Seven Inches and Robin’s Hood she leaps back in time and rearranges the colonial story, composing an unexpected sequence of events. In both films she plays the part of an Indigenous explorer, approaching European subjects with a removed curiosity. On the walls surrounding the Théâtre, Miss Chief has borrowed from Paul Kane and George Catlin’s prose for musings on her subject, the European Male:
Photo by Walter Willems
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2006
Mixed Media Installation
Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart
They are noble, gentlemanly, and high minded, although they are they often prone to argument and fierce bouts of independence.
The history and customs of such a people, preserved by pictorial illustrations, are themes worthy of the lifetime of one artist, and nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from knowing them and becoming their historian.
Photo by Walter Willems
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2008
Mixed Media Installation
Face the Nation
Art Gallery of Alberta
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