Dana Claxton is a Vancouver interdisciplinary artist who works in film, video and performance. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Walter Philips Gallery at Banff Centre and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her performances have been presented at AKA in Saskatoon, the Western Front and as part of Grunt Gallery’s Live at the End of the Century Performance Festival. Claxton’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
DANA CLAXTON
May 21–June 17, 2000
Waterspeak, a new installation work, blends video and film footage of waterfalls and the winter rapids of Capilano River to address issues of environmental degradation and differing cultural constructions of nature. Merging with the water, the characters Man and Woman overlap and dissolve in a quiet, insistent discussion about listening and speaking, The multiple moving images of natural phenomena are heightened through their scale and saturated colour. A rich and complex audio track samples water sounds and throat-singing with music by Russell Wallace, a composer who has collaborated with Claxton over the past decade. The seductive qualities of recorded voice, the familiarity of video and film, and the contemplative space of the gallery combine in an investigation of the sacred in art and the place these concerns might be given within the ‘artspeak’ of visual arts practice.
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Bibliography
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Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art
Title: Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art
Category: Criticism
Writers: Monika Kin Gagnon
Design: Roberta Batchelor, Brian Morgan bv
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press, Artspeak, Kamloops Art Gallery
Year published: 2000
Pages: 195pp
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Perfect Bound
Process: Offset
Features: 60 b&w images, 16 colour images
Dimensions: 23 x 16.5 x 1.5 cm
Weight: 340 g
ISBN: 1-55152-092-3
Price: $22 CDN
Other Conundrums, published by Artspeak Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery and Arsenal Pulp Press is an extraordinary collection of essays on Canadian artists of colour by Monika Kin Gagnon, one of Canada’s most respected art writers and curators. The essays explore the history of cultural production in this country with an emphasis on race, cultural difference, and cultural hybridity. Using specific artists and exhibitions as a starting-point for Gagnon’s discussions, these essays, and the artists she writes about, are firmly grounded in Canadian cultural events, artistic projects, and theoretical ideas concerning race and culture which have circulated in often disparate contexts for the last decade. The book makes a distinctively Canadian contribution to ongoing dialogues on issues of race and culture that have originated from artists, writers, and theorists from the US and Britain, and provides an important and relevatory context to the work of Canada’s artists of colour.
Monika’s writings have been published in numerous books, including topographies: aspects of recent B.C art, Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, and A Leap in the Dark, as well as many artist catalogues and magazines. She has a doctorate in philosophy from Simon Fraser University, and a Masters degree from York University. She currently lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University.