(Re)framing device

Shelley Niro takes a playful, yet confrontational stance to interrogate colonial understandings of history. Visitors to the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art at the AGO may be familiar with one of her most widely known works, The Shirt (2003)—a short film and a series of photographs using tourist T-shirts to lampoon the colonial settler presence on Indigenous land.

A member of the Bay of Quinte Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation, Turtle Clan, Niro was born in Niagara Falls, New York, but grew up on the Six Nations of the Grand River territory. She has been making and exhibiting art since the 1980s, working interchangeably between film, photography, performance, painting, sculpture, collage and beadwork. Niro’s work is multi-faceted, layering themes of colonialism, sovereignty, gender and ancestral knowledge to form a pointed commentary on the stereotypes placed upon Indigenous peoples (Indigenous women in particular) and colonial narratives. As seen through The Shirt (2003), Red Heels Hard (1991), Kissed by Lightning (2009) and The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw (2019), among others, Niro uses art to express her perspective as a Mohawk woman, often laced with wit, poignancy and scathing critique.

Niro’s This Land is Mime Land (1992) was created during a pivotal year in contemporary Indigenous art. 1992 was marked with incredible, prolific output from Indigenous artists from across the Americas as a form of protest against the Columbus Quincentenary–the 500th ‘anniversary’ of Christopher Columbus’ invasion of the Americas. Just recently acquired by the AGO in 2020, the series of twelve triptychs stands as one of the seminal works from that era. The second photo series by Niro to enter the AGO Collection, it’s now on view as part of the refreshed J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art on Level 2 of the Gallery. The AGO holds one of the few full editions of the series that were originally made.

Niro mounts 36 photographs onto twelve separate panels, and then hand-drills the panels’ borders with patterns evoking beadwork. She presents herself and her family members on each panel, staging them with three photographs: the “Historical,” the “Personal” and the “Contemporary”. Juxtaposed in this left-to-right sequence, the photographs exist in dialogue with each other, each one informing the following and the former. In the first photograph, Historical, Niro dons recognizable costumes like Elvis Presley, Santa Claus, the Statue of Liberty or a Star Trek crew member and others from everyday life: a Trapeze Artist, a Gentleman or a Mime. To animate her role-playing even further, Niro has hand-painted the first photograph. For example, in 500 Year Itch, a panel from the series, Niro is dressed as Marilyn Monroe in the first photograph—the panel’s title another play-on-words referring to the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch starring Monroe and containing the iconic scene of the actress standing over a New York City subway grate. Niro’s “itch” here is intolerable to her and her people, referencing centuries-long colonial violence and land theft. By subverting the Marilyn Monroe archetype – Monroe’s whiteness, unattainable beauty and celebrity notoriety – Niro reasserts control over her body, the representation of Indigenous women and what viewers understand to be “beautiful”. Yes, Niro is dressed as Monroe, but she’s also wearing glasses and uses a portable fan as a substitute for a subway gate. When asked about the first photographs in the series, Niro explained, “I’m putting on a face that can easily be recognized as belonging to the dominant society, albeit not as sexy or beautiful as the original but an image the viewer can understand immediately.”

The second photograph at the centre of each panel, Personal, is a sepia-toned photograph of one of Niro’s family members. “The middle image,” said Niro, “is an indicator of our view of the world.” Like a family photo album, Niro includes a photograph of her mother at pow-wow wearing a ‘Welcome to the Three Fires Pow-Wow’ T-shirt, her sister attending a protest on Capitol Hill in Ottawa, her father cutting wood in his teen years, her father’s grandmother standing in a field and so forth. Niro centres 500 Year Itch with a photograph of her mother swaying with a serene smile on her face. This photograph, pulled from Niro’s personal history, prompts viewers to (re)consider the first and third. What are the intersections between gender, beauty and whiteness? Although Monroe and Niro’s mother are of the same generation and general geographical location, these intersections as they experienced them are worlds away from each other.