zhigwe/aim week 1
Shelley Niro, The Rebel (1987)
Shelley Niro The Rebel, (1987, reprinted 2015)
hand-tinted colour photograph
In Shelley Niro’s hand-tinted photograph, The Rebel (1987) her mother, June Chiquita Doxtater is coquettishly posed across the trunk of the family car. This lively image both mocks the use of women’s bodies to market consumer products generally, but more emphatically Niro is layering-in her disputation of the on-going images of the Native woman as racialized and sexualized and resolutely located in the past. Niro’s work often draws on humour and the unexpected and in doing so she offers the viewer the opportunity to rethink their knowledge of Aboriginal people.
Of this photograph, Allan J. Ryan (1992) wrote, “Native women, especially those in their middle years, have rarely been portrayed with such candour and confidence… It may well take a Mohawk woman to photograph a Mohawk woman.”
Niro makes art that works to reconfigure the relationship between Native and non-Native Canadians. She is established in Canadian art as a multi-media artist with a strong practice in traditional and contemporary media, as she has been moving between painting, sculpture, beadwork, installation, photography and film throughout her nearly thirty year career with ease.
Shelley Niro is a senior artist from the Mohawk Nation of the Haudenosaunee and a member of the Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawks. She was raised at the Six Nations of the Grand River, located in South-Western Ontario.
For more information on The Rebel and other work go to:
