- Repository Number
- Location
- Artist
- Community
- Title
- Date
- Medium
- Technique
- Dimensions
- Description
- Provenance
- Inscription
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en-ca
SC0173-HTE-PH-1
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Not currently on display
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Terrance Houle (b. 1975)
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Indigenous
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Trail's End / End Trails
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2007
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Photography
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C-print on vinyl
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232.4 x 91.4 cm
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Often fighting ethnic discrimination using humour, the body of Terrance Houle’s work (video/film, performance art, photography, drawing and painting) examines the cultural identity, alienation and assimilation of First Nations Peoples. Trail’s End/End Trails is Houle’s irreverent response to an early 20th sculpture by American artist James Earle Fraser entitled The End of the Trail.
Uncritically welcomed at its unveiling, Fraser’s work has come to be been seen as a romantic fiction fixated on the contrived idea of the “noble savage.” Houle plays on this Hollywood cliché. Replete with breech cloth, the out of shape suburban native rides a child’s plastic hobby horse. Houle targets the simplistic identity of Native Americans associated with post colonialism. To this end, Houle joins a complement of Native artists railing against mischaracterization. So, what is Houle’s contribution? In the estimation of critic Murray Whyte, “frankly, it is something alarmingly simple. While Houle sketches colonialism’s master narratives—cowboys and Indians, modernity, and everything in between—in broad, bombastic strokes, his art is always, almost painfully, about himself. At once fearless, charismatic, tender and intimate—and, we mustn’t forget, uproariously funny—Houle’s work centres not on the desecrated, unspecific, victimized Other, but on the artist’s flabby, beer-drinking, pizza-eating single-dad Self. This works a strange magic, allowing Houle’s art to seem both accusatory and oddly endearing.”
Houle’s art skewers any hope of recapturing a lost idyllic age of Native self-sufficiency and innocence.
Houle’s self-mockery is his way of truth-telling, of putting an end to any and all naïve ideas that underwrite the continuation of older narratives, of older trails. (David Phillips, Seneca Polytechnic)
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Purchased from Terrance Houle. Purchase made possible through the generosity of the First Peoples @ Seneca.
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No signature
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