Rosalie Favell

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August 29 to November 22, 2015

Rosalie Favell Artist Conversation
Friday, October 9, 2015 | 7:30 pm

Join artist Rosalie Favell and exhibition Curator Michelle LaVallee for an exploration of the artists work, followed by a reception.

(Re)facing the Camera features two contrasting bodies of portraiture by Karsh Award-winning artist Rosalie Favell.

Facing the Camera (2008–2015) — presented here for the first time in its entirety — encircles the viewer with more than 275 portraits of Indigenous artists and curators, including Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Robert Houle,  Ruth Cuthand, and Kent Monkman. “For most, standing in front of a camera is unnerving. For many Aboriginal peoples, however, placing oneself within the photographic frame is a political act.” Given space to find their own way of dealing with the camera, Facing the Camera offers a monumental snapshot of the intellectual and creative players who have shaped contemporary Indigenous art production and practices.

Tucked in the midst of these portraits are images of a homier sort: small canvases that revisit the family albums of Favell’s childhood. Together these photographs and paintings present a complex self-portrait, and the photograph is revealed as a performance space where identity is constantly worked and reworked, re-presented, or sometimes hidden.

Organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the City of Regina, and the University of Regina.

REVEALED

THE PORTRAITS OF ROSALIE FAVELL

By Barry Ace (2015)*

For her most recent body of work Facing the Camera, artist Rosalie Favell presents us with a new suite of sumptuous black and white portraits documenting Native American and Indigenous curators, writers, academics and community advocates. The presentation of a portrait tableaux shares a technical and compositional similarity to that of the late American photographer Richard Avedon, whose portraiture of the latter 20th century focused predominately on the famous and infamous, namely celebrity, artistic, outsider and other influential people who either individually or collectively left an indelible mark on the contemporary social, cultural or political American landscape. In her portraiture series, Favell draws attention to predominantly Native American and international Indigenous change-makers who are artists, curators, educators, administrators, critical writers and cultural advocates.

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