Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch

Mohawk artist Shelley Niro’s first major retrospective spans four decades and features more than 70 pieces, including beading, painting, sculpture, photography and video. In a documentary commissioned by Art Gallery of Hamilton, Niro relates the experience of returning to past works: “You don’t see it for years, then you have to bring it back out and start thinking about why you made it and the circumstances it was made under. It’s like a diary.”

The title of this touring exhibition is from a work in one of Niro’s earliest series, This Land Is Mime Land (1992). In her hand-tinted photographic self-portrait 500 Year Itch (1992), Niro assumes Marilyn Monroe’s iconic Seven Year Itch (1955) position. But instead of standing over a sidewalk air vent, she is indoors, over an upturned table fan. The number 500 refers to the years since Columbus’ “discovery” of America, but it is the conflation of colonial trauma and humour that could make this work as much a coping mechanism as it is an important work of contemporary art.

In her media tour introduction, VAG chief curator Eva Respini spoke of Niro as someone who proceeds with “humour, hope and art.” For her part, Niro spent as much time speaking of “the future” as she did of the works that brought us together and into the present. Of these works, viewers were treated to a carefully woven braid of family, land and language intermingled with laughter, multidisciplinarity and political philosophy. If there is a work that embodies all these elements, it is The Shirt (2003), a video and photo series that concludes with a familiar punchline but is, with all due respect, no joke.

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