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Nothing is quite what it seems in the world of Canadian artist Kent Monkman. For starters, go to one of his shows and you'll probably find him decked up in the togs of his confused alter ego "Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle", a loin-cloth wearing, gender-bending Native American princess (Monkman is part Cree Indian so this isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds).
And then turn to his work; on first inspection his sweeping, majestic canvasses (in which "Miss Chief" regularly features) appear little more than kitschy, if masterfully executed, pastiches of the famous Hudson River American landscape school.
But look down from the Edenic skies, plains and mountains and you find the Hudson-perpetrated myth of how the West was won being rudely deconstructed. Out go all the heroic, fair-skinned Europeans, armed with rifles and Christian morals, teaching
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| The intoxicating brand of high campery is proving popular with curators and collectors |
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the natives the ways of commerce, fair negotiation and civilized behaviour. In comes a wave of conceptual perversion.
An example is The Fourth of March, in which a gang of lantern-jawed frontiersmen are seen getting all Village People-ish with a prostrate Indian in pink platform shoes. The obvious rape (of the land) metaphor is dodged. Another, The Rape of Daniel Boone Junior (detail, left) - well, that does just what it says on the tin.
This intoxicating brand of high campery is proving popular with curators and collectors. Sir Elton John and David Furnish (for whom Monkman's work could have been designed) recently paid an upper five-figure sum for The Promised Land: The Custer Family, and even flew the artist over for their wedding. Now there's an event where Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle would not have looked out of place. 
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