The Trickster Shift

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

In a book generously illustrated with scores of reproductions in full
color, Allan Ryan introduces readers to an unusual body of art that has
not been widely known among Western audiences, although clearly Western
art is known among the contemporary Native artists whose work is the
subject of this book. Their parodies of European art traditions are
strong and clever.

Jim Logan’s A Rethinking on the Western Front parodies
Michelangelo’s image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of God
empowering Adam. In Logan’s version, the Supreme Spirit is passing the
gift of humor to the first man of the First Nations. Logan’s Three
Environmentalists, a spoof of Raphael’s The Three Graces, shows three
naked Native women frolicking on a giant tree stump with the devastation
of clear-cutting depicted in the background.

Ryan, an anthropologist and art historian, explores the influence of
the trickster figure in the work of such artists as Carl Beam, Rebecca
Belmor, Bob Boyer, and Shelley Niro. He points to the classic Western
paintings that are being parodied (occasionally reproducing them beside
the Native versions) and explicates the details of the witty parodies.
His text includes many of his artists’ statements about individual
works, as well as their theories about the creative process and the
nature of Native humor. The latter involves teasing, punning, shocking
associations and—surprisingly?—compassion. Ryan’s text also
contains excerpts from Native elders, actors, linguists, museum
curators, and art historians. Often these borrowed texts illustrate the
trickster influence as wittily as do the images.

The Trickster Shift is an innovative and significant contribution to
the fields of Western art and Native studies.