Dana Claxton: Headdress - Shadae (2019)
An audio description for Dana Claxton's 2019 work "Headdress - Shadae"
Transcription:
Dana Claxton. Headdress – Shadae. 2019. Photographic transparency. Light box. AGA Collection.
Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist working in film, video, photography, and performance art. Her practice investigates Indigenous beauty, the body, the sociopolitical, and the spiritual. Dana Claxton is a professor and head of the Department of Art, History, Visual Arts and Theory at the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nation located in southwest Saskatchewan and she resides in Vancouver, Canada. Dana comments: “I am grateful for all of the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my Sundance teachings. Mni Ki Wakan. Water is sacred.”
This photograph is one of a series of artworks made in the years 2018 through 2019, highlighting the beauty and resilience of Indigenous women through their personal effects. The photograph measures 60 by 40 inches and is printed on colour transparency. It is mounted on an LED light box, giving it an ethereal effect to the image.
The image includes a three quarter length portrait of an Indigenous woman standing facing the viewer, including her head, shoulders and hands that rest beside her thighs. Her features are obscured by her cultural belongings, including jewelry bags, hats and ceremonial objects. The portrait is set against a blank background in a light-tone gray. The image and the subject are brightly lit with studio lighting that enhances the richness and vibrancy of colour.
In this portrait, the subject is wearing gifted items, suggesting the extent to which identity is shaped by her community and kinship.
Starting at the top of the subject’s head, she is wearing two pristine black ball caps. One of the ball caps faces left and the other faces to the right. It is tilted down just enough to reveal the elaborate beadwork adorning the brim. Beneath the ball caps is a hand woven Coast Salish cedar hat resting directly on the subjects head.
From inside the hat is a thick curtain of beaded necklaces of different colours, sizes, shapes, covering the subject's face and draping down past her shoulders. Natural and handcrafted turquoise beads, glass beads, and animal claws are prominent in the necklaces. The beads give way to ceremonial peyote fans belonging to the subject’s husband. Each fan contains a mix of brightly coloured feathers, sacred bird feathers, leather and beads. The fans extend from below her shoulders to her fingertips, her forearms, framing the feathers on either side. On each forearm, the subject wears intricately beaded cuffs that depict roses and hearts that are red and gold in colour. On her left hand she's wearing a diamond wedding ring.
This artwork acts as both a signifier for Indigenous cultural abundance and as a reminder that Indigenous women have long been cultural carriers. This is in contrast to how they are often represented in museums and galleries: as anonymous makers of cultural objects that have been displaced from their original context and displayed for settler consumption.
Claxton's work celebrates and acknowledges that Indigenous art and expression evolves and changes just like any other. It is not co-signed to pre-contact aesthetics. The stark, minimalist background is meant to highlight the exuberance and quality of this beadwork and signal the necessity of including Indigenous women within contemporary photographic portraiture more broadly.
