‘Terrance Houle is an interdisciplinary media artist and member of the blood tribe. He has traveled across North America participating in Powwow dancing and his native ceremonies. he works in a variety of mediums; performance, photography, video/film, music and painting. He also uses tools of mass dissemination such as billboards and buses.’
‘Many of Houle’s performances, it’s an absurd spectacle—a painfully deliberate cliché, plied with a knowing wink. To say that Houle’s work is centered on persistent stereotypes of Aboriginal representation goes beyond the obvious. His Calgary apartment is littered with every manner of Indian kitsch, including a Hiawatha doll on the mantle and a collection of steamy, trashy Western romance novels. In his Urban Indian series of photographs (2004) with Jarusha Brown, to pick just one example, Houle meanders through a quotidian routine—breakfast at a diner, grocery shopping, mundane office-drone chores in a cubicle—wearing full grassdance powwow regalia, headdress and all.
With his gleeful send-ups of rote Aboriginal representation—however mild, or hilarious—Houle joins generations of First Nations contemporary artists for whom the simplistic Indian identities fashioned by post-colonialism are a favorite target.
While Houle sketches colonialism’s master narratives—cowboys and Indians, modernity, and everything in between—in broad, bombastic strokes, his art is always, almost painfully, about himself. At once fearless, charismatic, tender and intimate—and, we mustn’t forget, uproariously funny—Houle’s work centers not on the desecrated, unspecific, victimized Other, but on the artist’s flabby, beer-drinking, pizza-eating single-dad Self.’
“We were the Native family,” he says. “Our identity was constantly being pointed out to us. But my folks always used humour to cushion the blow. We were taught at an early age not to put the barrier up, but to try to teach people who we are. I think that’s why, at an early age, I started getting into art.”
http://canadianart.ca/features/2011/09/15/terrance_houle/
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