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Saddled With, 2025Installation
Discontinued “Giddy Up” Covington Fabric, sticks, acrylic paint, embroidery thread, fringe Dimensions variable Living as a settler in the heart of Treaty 1 Territory and the Metis Nation, I am hyperconscious of the social, psychological and environmental impacts of colonialism and the ways they continue to impact our community. As a child, I saw oversimplified and inaccurate narratives of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in games, books, and on television. These tropes - intended as entertainment - placed settlers against Indigenous communities in battles of good versus evil. They held white settlers as heroes (or victims!) rather than reflecting the actual result of territorial occupation, deep cultural racism and capitalist greed: the displacement and unheeded genocide of Indigenous communities, and the transformation of ecosystems in the West through resource exploitation, pollution, and habitat destruction. Creating Saddled With was a meditative and cathartic exercise in reversal -a methodical obscuring. Through stitching, painting and cutting, I am changing a pattern: systematically removing the ‘cowboys’, allowing openness and regeneration to slowly unfold in the western landscape. |
From the Past / Present Tense show brochure:
"Dawn Knight's three-panelled installation Saddled With further questions the ongoing impacts of colonialism that shape and harm our land. Her 3-panelled installation references the trope of Cowboys and Indians to comment on the dominance of settler traditions and ways in which our country’s social structures and systems of governance continue to systematically oppress Indigenous peoples, taking land and resources and adding to the larger global environmental crisis.
Knight notes that the term ‘cowboy’ is twofold: either a person who tends cattle or someone who behaves recklessly; a swindler; a scoundrel. It is this quality of unscrupulousness and bottomless greed that she connects with her cowboys. Reflecting on her own settler identity, Knight describes her art-making process as meditative, ritualistic, and penance-like. As she works on a systematic removal of any evidence of the cowboys, she leaves opened spaces in a transformed present, filled with potential."
- Allison Moore
"Dawn Knight's three-panelled installation Saddled With further questions the ongoing impacts of colonialism that shape and harm our land. Her 3-panelled installation references the trope of Cowboys and Indians to comment on the dominance of settler traditions and ways in which our country’s social structures and systems of governance continue to systematically oppress Indigenous peoples, taking land and resources and adding to the larger global environmental crisis.
Knight notes that the term ‘cowboy’ is twofold: either a person who tends cattle or someone who behaves recklessly; a swindler; a scoundrel. It is this quality of unscrupulousness and bottomless greed that she connects with her cowboys. Reflecting on her own settler identity, Knight describes her art-making process as meditative, ritualistic, and penance-like. As she works on a systematic removal of any evidence of the cowboys, she leaves opened spaces in a transformed present, filled with potential."
- Allison Moore
