Dana Claxton – New Works

Opening October 17th, Vancouver
October 17 – November 28, 2026

Opening October 30th, Toronto
October 30 – November 28, 2026

This month we celebrate two new bodies of work by Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota) in both our gallery spaces: Vancouver and Toronto. On view are new lens-based works that evoke the history of conceptual photography, while subverting art historical narratives by making space for new perspectives. 

Continuing her series on the metropolis with Paris (2006) and New York (2015), Dana’s suite of Vancouver are inverted landscape photographs that deliberately disrupt perspectival principles. Here, the city appears destabilized, refusing the conventions of foreground and background. Instead, the images read as sedimentary accumulations, where urban expansion, land, and sky compress into stratified fields of information. This inversion gestures toward early histories of photography, recalling the optical logic of the camera obscura while explicitly invoking Rodney Graham’s iconic inverted tree, a touchstone for audiences attuned to the photographic and conceptual legacies of the West Coast.

Also presented is a new series of assemblage collage works that bring “fringe” into focus. By using “fringe” as a physical and conceptual framework, she investigates how photography can break free from static borders to embrace movement, fragmentation, and three-dimensional space. Over a thirty-year career in lens-based media, her studio has accumulated a dense visual archive of test strips and printed proofs on fabric, paper, and transparency film. While these studio archives served as the impetus and provided the material for initial proofs-of-concept, they have now become an entirely new body of work, as she fringes photography and creates sculptural reliefs. 

The fringe is not a new motif for Dana; it is a thread that runs through her entire life and practice, rooted deeply in Lakota aesthetics. In Lakota material culture, fringe is profoundly versatile. It serves practical purposes—camouflaging a hunter in the tall prairie grass, shedding rainwater, or acting as material for repairs—but it also carries spiritual properties by embodying the movement of wind and the natural world. Wearing fringe connects you directly to earth through the soft brushing against the ground, grass, and stones. During Pow-wow, Grass Dancers emulate prairie grass through movement and swaying fringe, Fancy Shawl as butterflies, and Traditional with the swing of fringe. Dana states – “long live fringe!”