Lori Blondeau, Belle Sauvage, 2005
$500

This work is a six-colour silkscreen print on BFK Rives 100 per cent cotton rag paper. The paper dimension is 22" x 30".

This print is one out of an edition of 16, created by Banff Centre alumnus Lori Blondeau during the Visual Arts 2005 Aboriginal New Works Creative Residencies program. Lori was a senior artist and stuido fellow for this program. The title of the work, Belle Sauvage, references the central subject; a persona Blondeau has assumed in her performance art.

As a Cree/Saulteaux artist, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice continues to explore the influence of popular media and culture (contemporary and historical) on Aboriginal self-identity, self-image, and self-definition. Lori has been culturally producing as an artist, instructor, and curator for the last twenty years. She is currently exploring the impact of the colonization of traditional and contemporary roles and lifestyles of Aboriginal women by strategically deconstructing the popular images of the Indian Princess and the Squaw. Blondeau uses humor as a performative storytelling strategy to reconstruct these stereotypes, reveal their absurdity, and reinsert them into the mainstream. The performance personas she creates, like Belle Sauvage, refer to the damage of colonialism and to the ironic pleasures of displacement and resistance.

Lori Blondeau is currently completing her PhD in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She is also a co-founder and the current director of one of Canada’s most innovative Aboriginal arts organizations, TRIBE. Blondeau’s collaborations and apprenticeships with other internationally renowned artists including Bradlee Larocque and James Luna have produced works such as The Ballad of the Shameman and Betty Daybird (2000).