Charlene Vickers - Richmond Art Gallery

Submitted by Dina Verchomin on Fri, 2008-02-29 16:16
Posted: Fri, 2008-02-29 16:16

Charlene Vickers (94) presents two bodies of work in Brown Skin Before Red. In Sleepwalking, Vickers recontextualizes items often sold as metonymic simulations, or souvenirs of First Nations culture. She re-creates moccasins and blankets with materials that point to current social and cultural conditions in urban First Nations life and combines them with personal artifacts. Her painting series Supernatural Indian reinterprets the copper plate photographic portraits of First Nations peoples taken/constructed by Edward Curtis in collaboration with his subjects. Vickers transforms the source images into powerful interrogations of nostalgia, self-identification, the truth-value invested in photography, and the irretrievable losses of pre-contact identity and meaning inflicted upon First Nations cultures by European

colonization.

An artist talk for Charlene Vickers will be held on Sunday, March 29 at 2pm.

Richmond Art Gallery

March 8 to April 20, 2008

Opening reception Friday, March 7, 6:30pm-9:30pm

For more information, please visit the Richmond Art Gallery