Wendy Red Star

Four Seasons

Four Seasons, 2006

Series of 4 Archival pigment print on Sunset Fiber rag, 21 x 24 inches each

Red Star’s early self-portrait series, Four Seasons (2006), signals a point of departure for several serial photographic projects that followed. This is one of the earliest series in which Red Star used herself as a subject, and it captures the humor and playfulness integral both to Crow culture and to her artwork. In the series, Red Star poses within constructed dioramas filled with inflatable animals and artificial materials, a project that pokes fun at the boundaries between conceived authenticity and stereotypical portrayals of Native subjects. The portraits encourage self-reflection, making viewers aware of the deeply ingrained stereotypes of Native Americans in popular culture. By staging herself in artificial scenes, Red star evokes precedents like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from the late 1970s, in which the artist posed in fictitious scenes that make visual reference to Hollywood B movies. Like Sherman, Red Star draws on feminine stereotypes constructed and reified through popular culture. However, rather than performing the self as multiple, as Sherman does through her constantly changing disguises, Red Star is driven by the complex narrative of her identity as an Apsáalooke woman and by an awareness of the difficulties that Native women encounter navigating the art world. In this sense, her series represents a strategic mode of intervention into the conventions of portraiture and can be understood through its signifiers of race, cultural rootedness, and female agency, tying this body of work instead to self-portraiture precedents like artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Ana Mendieta, and Laura Aguilar.

— Text from Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, Newark Museum exhibition catalogue, 2019, Nadiah Rivera Fellah and Tricia Laughlin Bloom