Artist in Residency at the PAU: Shelley Niro
The Peterborough Arts Umbrella is pleased to announce their upcoming artist residency with Shelley Niro May 19-23. Niro will be working with a group of local artists, actors and filmmakers to workshop and shoot a scene from the script, “Johnny Seven Fires”, written by local emerging filmmaker and writer Howard Adler. Niro will also be using the Peterborough Arts Umbrella facilities to create a new work. We are excited and delighted to have an artist of Shelley’s calibre doing work here at the PAU! Niro will also be presenting her film “Honey Moccasin”, Thursday, May 22nd @ Artspace as part of a presentation featuring Indigenous Women including Niro and artist Tannis Neilson in partnership with the O’Kaadenigaan Wiingashk Collective. The cost of this event is $5 or pay what you can with a start time of 8pm. Doors open at 7:30.
Niro is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford. She was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1954, and has studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts, is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, and received her MFA from the University of Western Ontario. Working in a variety of media, including beadwork, painting, photography, and film, Niro challenges stereotypical images of Aboriginal peoples through strategies of masquerade, parody, and appropriation. Often using herself, friends, and family members as subjects, the artist creates depictions of Aboriginal peoples in counterpoint to those generated by centuries of colonization. Through her often direct yet humorous approach the artist proposes numerous possibilities for lived experience, presenting identity as a fluid and complex state, not one that is fixed and singular. Her work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada and her award-winning films have been screened at festivals worldwide. Her art can be found in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and now here in NAICA online’s Spring edition! For more information on Niro visit http://www.thenaica.org/edition_eight/air/intro.htm where she is the North America Indigenous Cinema and Arts featured artist in residence for Spring 2008.
A comedy/thriller complete with a fashion show and torchy musical numbers, Honey Moccasin employs a surreal pastiche of styles to depict the rivalry between bars the smokin' moccasin and the Inukshuk Cafe, the saga of closeted drag queen/powwow clothing thief Zachary John, and the travails of crusading investigator Honey Moccasin. this irreverent reappropriation of familiar narrative strategies serves as a provocative spring-board for an investigation of authenticity, cultural identity, and the articulation of modern American Indian experience in cinematic language and pop culture.
To view a clip visit this link http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/reservation_x/eXtras/media/feverA.htm
Tannis Nielsen. M.V.S.– an Oji - Cree, Danish Métis holding a Masters of Visual Studies degree from the University of Toronto. Practicing as a professional multi-media artist / educator for a number of years, her most recently held position is as sessional instructor, at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Where Tannis designed and implemented, a third year liberal studies curriculum based upon decolonization methodologies. Tannis is an Aboriginal representative to The Equity and Diversity Committee of the Ontario College of Art and Design as well, as a director on the board of “The Association of Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts (ANDPVA)” and A-Space galleries. Her most recent exhibitions located at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary Alberta titled Honouring Traditions” and also “Red Eye”, curated by Ryan Rice.