Portrait in Motion

In this work, Nadia Myre paddles a canoe through mist on Lake Kickanakwat in Kitigan Zibi community in the Outaouais region. On the one hand, she embodies the stereotypical Indigenous figure who lets themself be spied on, as depicted in many twentieth-century Westerns that foreground the gaze of the exoticizing and othering outsider on the Indigenous subject. On the other hand, she looks directly at the camera, undermining the groundless asymmetry of such a relationship. She thus moves between eras to manifest the land’s history.