Halifax artist turns tables on cultural appropriation

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It's all too easy and tempting to dismiss Teresa Marshall's Latitude 53 show as a series of puns. After all, here's an artist who pastes a photograph of a poverty-stricken Native into a fire extinguisher and then titles it Cultural Extinguisher.

But the Halifax-based artist's show, The Department of Indians Affairs, is more than just a number of weak jokes. Rather, it is an anarchic and ironic celebration, an opportunity for the artist to turn the tables.

Marshall has gleefully put together an exhibit on cultural appropriation in which she is the one doing the appropriation. She takes everyday objects, combines them together in surprising ways, and arrives at a new meaning for old things.

Take the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for instance. It's a red desk fixed up with an enormous heart-shaped mirror and tricked out with a remarkable assortment of kitsch.

The bureau is festooned with rubber tomahawks, and its drawer contains a bizarre assortment of items, including a package of underwear called - believe it or not - Chief's Briefs. As well, an atomizer sits on the bureau, its lettering altered to read Eau de Cologne lalism.

But the kicker comes when you stand away from the desk. Attached to the bureau are a handle and wheels. The reference is obvious: the bureau is transformed into a little red wagon. Get it?

All of Marshall's work is like this. She appropriates and reinvents white culture until she achieves the political statement she wants to make. Her objects are both funny and bitter.

The most outright contemptuous statement of the show is The Indian Agent's Chair. Really, it's a throne, complete with toilet seat, and a bedpan filled with wooden nickels.

Elsewhere is the Bering Strait Jacket. That's a pin-striped suit jacket sewn with extra long sleeves with hooks attached at the end. A companion piece is The Seven Deadly Sins, a grouping of men's ties stuffed to look like snakes, all of them converging on an apple.

On the gallery's wall hangs the Blanket Cheques. These are six Hudson's Bay Blankets mounted in the shape of a cross. All of them have been screened to look like oversized cheques.

The cheques are made payable to Canada's First People. The payment reference is for Land, liberty and justice. And the cheques are signed D. Iscover. Heavy handed? Perhaps.

But it's also a thoughtful show that is particularly inventive in its use of materials. Marshall's clever tale on cultural appropriation eventually says far more than any number of essays on the issue.

Appearing at the same time as Marshall's exhibit is Kent Monkman's The Museum Show. His series of eight oil paintings on canvas show a people trapped in a foreign culture and struggling to escape the restraints placed on them..

"The museum as we know it has been perceived as the house of truth, full of resourceful information on everything that has ever been," writes essayist Lynn Hill on Kent Monkman's work.

But as Hill points out, large collections of primitive and ethnographic material perpetuate myths about Aboriginal peoples. This "also confines and restricts the cultural growth of a people."

Monkman's painting of tangled roots are alive with energy. He's scraped, scribbled and slashed on his paint. His art is a vivid depiction of frustration and anger.

And at the same time, the Toronto-based artist's painting show how much more there is to First Nations art than what is found in most museums.

Both exhibits run until August 12.