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Kent Monkman
Born in 1965, in St Marys, ON, Canada
Lives and work in New-York, US and Toronto, ON, Canada
The Transfiguration
2015
BIO
Monkman (1965) is an interdisciplinary visual artist and Fisher River Cree Nation member in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba). He lives and works in New York City and Toronto. Known for his thought-provoking interventions into Western European and American art history, he explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience, as well as the complexities of Indigenous experiences, through painting, film, video, performance, and installation. His gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.
Artist's social medias
Video installation, 75 cm x 120 cm x 8 cm
PL-1552, Phyllis Lambert Collection
In The Transfiguration, Miss Chief disembarks from her limo amid a picturesque, painted Italian villagescape to perform a ceremony over the twisted body of a reclining Picasso nude. As the result of her ministrations, the body releases a spirit in the form of an angel. “The Modernists such as Picasso deconstructed, with considerable violence, the female nude,” says Monkman “I have been using Picasso’s butchered female nudes to talk about the European assault on the female spirit. Many indigenous cultures are matriarchal and were not respected or understood by patriarchal European societies.”
