ABSTRACT
The Big Four, an installation of four “junker” automobiles by Swampy Cree artist Kent Monkman, explores Indigenous people’s confinement in various settings—the reserve, the museum, the administrative borders of the state, and outdoor Wild West–inspired exhibitions that sidelined Indigenous people to stock anachronistic figurations. Collaborative, embodied, fragmented, and repaired, the particular media that Monkman selects for his installation mirrors the narratives and histories told in The Big Four. The Big Four gestures to worlds that push out from the static, ironized representations of the museum tableaux. In addition to its use of automobiles, The Big Four also uses the representationally charged media of museum artifacts, borrowed from the Glenbow’s collection, to tell its story of Indigenous survival and reinvention. The Big Four reveals a special interest in material culture, immersed in worlds of artifacts, crafts, museum specimens, cars, and redeemed “junk.”.
