This Denver Art Museum Event Combines Props, Sculptural Garments and Performance

Combining props, sculptural garments and elements of performance and installation, Meryl McMaster’s transformative self-portraits explore “contradictions and conflicts in my dual heritage,” she says, transporting the viewer out of the ordinary in the process. In “Bring Me to This Place” (2017, inkjet print, shown here), the award-winning artist—of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British and Dutch ancestry—stands poised on the “edge of a moment” at the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Alberta, Canada. The Ottawa-based McMaster is one of 30 contemporary indigenous photographers who leverage their lenses in the new exhibition “Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography,” opening at the Denver Art Museum in February. Grappling with themes like belonging and dislocation, their imagery ranges from dreamlike to sharply satirical as photography provides a powerful storytelling medium for enacting a spirited dialogue of identity and culture.