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DANA CLAXTON

Biography

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed international exhibiting artist. She works in film, video, photography, single and multi-channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker ArtCentre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), Eiteljorg Museum of AmericanIndians and Western Art, Indianapolis (IN) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), Cyrstal Bridges (Bentonville, AR), with exhibitions at Nasher Gallery of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Minneapolis(MN).

She is Head and an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. Her family reserve is Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and she resides in Vancouver Canada.

Artist Statement

In her series Headdress, Dana Claxton continues to extol indigenous cultural abundance. The personal collections of five woman are featured: Jeneen’s collection of beadwork spans three generations from Old Crow Yukon, with designs that are specific to the Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation; Connie, matriarch of beadwork, adorns her own hand beaded pieces; Shadae mixes it up with hip-hop baseball caps, a Coast Salish woven cedar hat, and her husband’s pow wow/peyote fans; Dee and Dana wear pieces of the same inter-tribal collection made by beaders from the four directions. In these portraits, the beadworks cover and espouse the woman’s silhouettes, becoming more than just objects: the beadworks are cultural belongings, and the woman are cultural carriers.