MADE TO BE READY

Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Canada, 2016

Claxton's new photographs and video works in Made To Be Ready are informed by her attention to Indigenous womanhood and sovereignty. Drawing on the ideas of Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, particularly his notion of survivance which unifies survival and resilience as a means of resistance, Claxton's photos picture Indigenous women commanding their own mediation of cultural, political and spiritual ways of being and doing.

The women in these works captivate the life force of Lakota cultural belongings that are to be actively used in domestic work, warfare, social space and ritual. They counter the commodification of Indigenous aesthetics and the preservation of "artifacts." The works are charged with Claxton's concept of the Indigenous made-to-be-ready, which draws attention to the everyday aura of aesthetic forms, inverting the concept of the modernist ready-made and its attention to the aesthetic aura of everyday forms.

— From the Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery’s website

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Untitled (Visual Art Faculty Show), Audain Arts Centre, Vancouver Canada - 2016

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Revisited, Tribe & AKA, Saskatoon SK - 2015