The Queer Indigenous Artists Reclaiming a Fluid Sense of Gender
THE PHOTOGRAPH FRAMES what appears to be a female figure, naked and glossed with oil, against a backdrop of pale rose brown, just a shade darker than the model’s skin.
Long, dark hair cascades over the breasts and, where the viewer might expect the genitalia to be, the model grips the great rack of a caribou, the skull cupped like a codpiece and the antlers jutting out, beams spread nearly four feet wide and reaching in height from mid-thigh to the tip of the model’s nose, with 15 points on each side.
Both the artist, Dayna Danger, and the model, Adrienne Huard, are Indigenous, based in what is today Canada — Danger, 35, is Métis, of Anishinaabe (Saulteaux) and Polish ancestry, and Huard, 34, is Anishinaabe and a registered member of the Couchiching First Nation — and the antlers evoke tribal traditions of hunting in which no part of the animal is wasted, with bones, horns and antlers repurposed as tools and sacred objects.
But the tension in this image, a 2017 portrait from the ongoing series “Big’Uns,” comes from a more cavalier approach to hunting, as sport.
