A young female Bison grazes on winter grasses, Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

‘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.”