Dana Claxton uses beauty to tell difficult truths about colonialism

Dana Claxton’s art is subversive. What you first see are visually beautiful images that use traditional pictorial building blocks such as colour and form to lead you into the work. But once you’re in, you realize you’re experiencing something inspired by the harsh legacy of colonialism.
Many of her works are about both the losses experienced by Indigenous people and how we, the descendants of Europeans and other immigrants, played a role in those losses. She binds the two in a