Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Lori Blondeau

Lori Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux artist whose practice explores 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 20 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 humour 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.