Highlights from New Yorks Frieze Week via Canadian Art Magazine - Most striking, perhaps, was “The Urban Res,” Kent Monkman‘s first New York solo show, which took place at Sargent’s Daughters, a Lower East Side gallery. In four large new canvases, Monkman continued his recent trends of using urban Winnipeg settings to house a range of characters and figures—from Henry Moore–style sidewalk loiterers to tattooed members of the Indian Posse to renaissance-style angels to his signature gender-bending alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Other repeating motifs in the paintings included the use of petroglyph symbols as graffiti scrawled on fences and walls; the placement of cubist figures in realistically painted settings; and themes of violence and death. (One pieta-like painting shows a smoky spirit leaving a body.) Also weaving through it all, as usual, is Monkman’s sense of wit and play. At the rear of the gallery is a new installation by Monkman. Cannily named Bête Noire, the natural-history-style diorama and backdrop—in style, not unlike those seen in the 1980s and before at Winnipeg’s Museum of Man and Nature—shows Miss Chief Eagle Testickle seated on a black motorcycle, wearing a dreamcatcher brassiere and with a quiver of hot-pink arrows at the ready. In the foreground, felled by some of those arrows, is a flat sculpture of a cubist-style buffalo. Also scattered about—both painted in the backdrop and sculpted in the diorama—are replicas of Picasso’s famous “head of a bull” sculpture, fashioned out of a bicycle seat and bicycle handlebars. - See more at: canadianart.ca/features/2014/05/15/frieze-can-con/#sthash.1LmZhzZi.dpuf
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 14:40:41 +0000
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