Kent Monkman

Monkman created sets and costumes for several Native Earth Performing Arts productions, including Lady of Silences (1993) by Floyd Favel and Diva Ojibway (1994) by Tina Mason.

[6] He also accepted the honorary title of grand marshal for Pride Toronto that year, citing the importance of recognition for Indigenous people during the 150th anniversary of Canada celebrations.

[18] Some of the binaries he tackles are "artist and model, colonial explorer and colonized subject, gazer and gazed upon, male and female, straight and queer, past and present, real and imaginary.

[2] He has been criticized for using mimicry,[citation needed] but it has also been argued that he is "chang[ing] the signification of the language of oppression, [as] even the minority artist must appeal to a mainstream audience.

[22] Models posed in the style of classic paintings, and then the photographs were projected on large canvas, traced, and base-painted by assistants before Monkman did his finishing touches.

[22] He derived Miss Chief's Wet Dream (2018) from two French paintings, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault and Christ Asleep during the Tempest (1854) by Eugène Delacroix, to evoke Canada's relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonizers.

"[15] Miss Chief Eagle Testickle is the two-spirit alter ego that Monkman uses in his art; she is a hunter, artist, activist, seducer, hero, and performer.

[31] "Eagle Testickle" sounds like "egotistical", to allude to “what Monkman sees as the egotism of 19th century [Euro-North American] artists.”[29] As Penny Cousineau-Levine claims, by originally identifying with Cher, “Miss Chief foregrounds her ‘half-breed’ identity.

[39] Monkman appropriates John Mix Stanley’s painting Buffalo Hunt (1845), which uses “the image of the [Indigenous] male and presents him as a mysterious, exotic figure; the subject of romanticized notions of the Noble Savage,” while the cowboy's exposed bottom is “a sign that he is to be dominated by his pursuant” and of “his desirability and vulnerability to sexual contact.

[32] As Alla Myzelev explains, Miss Chief “blurs the accepted boundaries between... authentic and inauthentic cultural formations.”[34] Miss Chief is “a trickster, undefinable, fluid, charming, upsetting, silly, playful, revealing.”[37] She is able to travel between oppositions that “structure life in North America” by undermining polarities between “the past and present, [the] resistant and the complicit... [the] authentic and the degraded.”[31] Despite the violence and brutality of her actions in many of Monkman's works, the irony of the depicted scenes is often humorous.

[37] As literary critic Eva Gruber explains, many Indigenous artists and authors ironically “engage with the representational tropes [of Indigeneity], very nearly reproducing them in order to subvert and expose them as false constructions.”[44] Shirley Madill argues that Miss Chief's ability to “reverse the gaze of colonizers” tricks audiences into engaging with how all historical narratives are constructed.