Shelley Niro retrospective re-poses questions of originality and aboriginality
As I ascended the escalator to view Shelley Niro’s solo retrospective exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I saw a friend. In “Abnormally Aboriginal”, a photographic and text-based piece from 2013.
Niro uses photographic self-portraits and text to question what being “aboriginal” and/or “original” might mean. I installed this piece for curator Lori Beavis at the Northern Front Studio in Whitehorse in September 2016 in the context of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective’s Gathering in Whitehorse. That organization is now called the Indigenous Curatorial Collective (icca.art.)
Although even after two hours, I wished I had allowed more time, I walked away from this show feeling a much more grounded appreciation for Niro’s work. Her pieces informed and resonated with each other. I strongly recommend that you go see it, if you can find the time if you’re down in Vancouver between now and February 17, 2025.
If you miss it in Vancouver, maybe you can check it out at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, April 4 to August 31 of next year, its fifth stop on a tour that includes galleries across Canada and in New York State. Go in any case, but go with more time than I had if you can!
I would also recommend bringing headphones that connect to your cell phone. Many of the works had QR codes beside them to allow you to listen to Niro speak about the histories of the pieces herself. I didn’t have these.
Niro was born in Niagara Falls, New York. She is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanyen’kehà:ka (Mohawk) Nation, from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory. Wall texts refer to the “Haudenosaunee system of matriarchy, which traces ancestry through the mother’s family and guides personal obligations and responsibilities.”
I think that many Yukon-based art viewers will recognize these values in the way she works with images of her mother and sisters, and the characters of laughing, teasing aunties.
Niro has been at this for a long time. The exhibition spans her important and influential body of work over 35 years. I stumbled upon a few copies of Artscraft Quarterly recently from 1989 and 1990–a magazine produced by the National Indian Arts And Crafts Corporation. One issue included a photograph of her painting “The Waitress,” on display in this exhibition.
In the Summer/Fall 1989 issue, she’s listed in a group touring exhibition “by women of Native ancestry” at the York Quay Gallery in Toronto, curated by Shirley Bear. The same issue included a feature on the Yukon Indian Arts and Crafts Co-operative Ltd.
Niro’s work belongs in a community of practice that connects to Yukon artwork–it’s been part of related conversations. Some of her strategies, especially the use of whiteface and role playing, resonate in particular with “Erased,” Doug Smarch’s 2003 photographic piece in the Yukon Permanent Art Collection.
It’s important to know how long artwork has been in the making that engages with colonization in this way. It’s also great to see her work given this kind of undivided attention, to make that space in the viewer’s imagination, and to see how the various media she works with relate to each other.
In the four corners of the installation, you can sit and view films from a catalogue of more than 30 titles, many of which she wrote, directed and produced. Outside one of the film-viewing rooms, you can see a hand-beaded movie poster from one of her projects, a film called Honey Moccasin.
Beading and film come together in a wide variety of ways in this exhibition, ranging from film and photography work depicting traditional artists, to 1779:an elaborately-beaded pair of boots stands on a screen where you can watch moving video of Niagara falls through the boots’ cascade of white beads. The interpretive card relates how in 1779 Niro’s Haudenosaunee forebears sought shelter at nearby Fort Niagara from George Washington.
The curators have done a good job of relating some of the histories of Niro’s own family history with colonization to provide context for the artworks. Niro’s ancestors fought alongside Loyalists against Americans in the American Revolution War.
They came to Canada and, in gratitude for their service, were granted land along the Grand River, which includes the current site of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.. Very little of this land remains in the possession of Six Nations of the Grand River. A wall map lays this out clearly.
Many of Niro’s photographic pieces use repeating images. This is the basic way that film works; Niro uses still images with a sense of character and the unfolding of a story in The Shirt from 2003 and the Sleeping Warrior series from 2012, another piece exhibited in Whitehorse, at Northern Front Studio.
The Sleeping Warrior series includes an image called Dressing Warrior where the outfits from the other photographs are all included, floating around the young man reclining on a couch, with tabs like the outfits for a paper doll.
Niro navigates the stresses of the various identities of an Indigenous person through her experiments with identities in film, photography and painting. She often brings a playfulness to these topics that makes it possible to carry on, possible for us to hear the stories, without lying about how hard they are. She will tell you the truth and make you laugh.
Niro often invokes the story of Sky Woman falling to Turtle Island. This is not a story I have encountered in Yukon Indigenous stories but one that you will be familiar with if you have read Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s an important story in contemporary Indigenous thinking across Canada, and Niro’s interpretations of it are deep and varied.
Sky Woman’s presence attends “Raven’s World,” Niro’s 2015 large oil painting of her only grandchild. The girl wears a beaded aviator’s cap, with a hand raised to her goggles. Seeing far. Corn plants around the high stool she sits on impart a sense of rootedness. The moon stands behind her in a cosmos swirling with many-coloured stars.
Images of the moon recur in Niro’s works, as well as a feeling of the wider universe. Space travel and Sky Woman join to create a suggestion of Indigenous futurism. It reminds me of the Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, the role that dreaming of the stars can play in imagining a world that resists oppression and opens the doors to freedom.
In more than one work, both visual art and film, Niro celebrates the work of other Indigenous artists, beading and carrying out other traditional arts. She engages the performative act of making from many angles.
Thinking caps, 1999, incorporates photos of hands beading as well as lists of words from language learning. Its series of beaded caps, part of the installation, sent me rushing back to Raven’s World, because this is the shape of hat her granddaughter is wearing in this painting. This show gives us these moments of connection between the artworks, where Niro’s varied practices come together into a rare chance to hear her voice. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did.
Go see it if you can. Admission is free for Indigenous people who self-identify at the Admissions Desk and youth up to age 18. For non-B.C. residents who are not gallery members, entry is $35. The gallery is closed Tuesdays. Check out its website for more details.
