McGill.CA / Integrated Studies in Education / Research / Faculty Research Projects

zhigwe/aim week 3

Lori Blondeau and Adrian Stimson, Putting the Wild back into the West (2004)

Lori Blondeau and Adrian Stimson
Putting the Wild back into the West (2004)
Performance and installation

This work is a long-running interactive installation – performance series in which audience members participate in taking Wild-West photo portraits. 

A camp sense of humour comes across in Stimson and Blondeau’s photographs, as the artists pay homage to the histories of Native performers in the Wild West shows. The artists play both with the idea of race and gender – with Blondeau in a Calamity Jane cowgirl outfit and Stimson donning fishnet tights and a skimpy buffalo “robe” as he plays with the notion of the sexualized native princess.

Believable and absurd at once, these personae are based, in part, on the histories of Indigenous men and women, who performed in Wild West shows and vaudeville in the early 20th century.

In Putting the Wild back into the West the artists playful though serious work seeks to remind us of the on-going impact of the colonial legacy – through the sexualization of the native body and the loss of land and therefore freedom to freely occupy the land.

The performance – installations can be purposely outrageous and excessive, because going too far is about taking audiences out of their comfort zones and reflecting their prejudices back at them, refusing to legitimize them. In recreating the Wild West as a camp spectacle, Stimson and Blondeau’s work reveals their love of parodic exaggeration and elaborate staginess. Mixing satirical spectacle, camp aesthetics and anti-colonial critique, these artists depict the West as high-camp theatre, in which everything is done “in quotations” and nothing is what it seems to be.

For more information about Blondeau and Stimson, follow these links:

 

     [RETURN TO zhigwe/aim MAIN PAGE]

 

Back to top