Content area
Full text
BADLAND: Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Bonnie Devine, Erica Lord, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place, 983-8900; through January 2010
BADLAND reaffirms my belief that Native American artists are doing some of the most innovative and thought-provoking imagery to date. It's their ability to consider, digest, and reinterpret their history and its relevancy to current Indian affairs that makes this possible. Consequently, this multimedia group show -- divvied up into seven separate spaces within the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts -- provides humor, sarcasm, documentation, beauty, and images of violence, depending upon whose work you choose to see.
A chuckle or two can be found in Cree/Saulteaux/Metis artist Lori Blondeau's black-and-white photographic series titled Puttin' the Wild Back Into the West (2009). In 10 cliched group portraits, complete with a painted backdrop of snowcapped mountains and
a non-Indian rug on the floor, Blondeau places herself amid a cast of poseurs in a makeshift studio resembling that of 19th-century...