Flow, 2011

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal 
Private Collection, Montreal 
ByDealers, auction, Montreal, 18 June 2020, lot 41 
Private Collection, Ottawa

Kent Monkman: Miss America, Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal, 25 August-­ 22 September 2012

Steve Loft and Rachelle Dickenson, Kent Monkman: Miss America, [online publication], Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, 2012, accessed 7 October 2025

Kent Monkman is a contemporary Cree artist born in St. Marys, Ontario, and based in Toronto. Renowned for his bold, narrative paintings, Monkman explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience from a distinctly Indigenous perspective, working across painting, film, installation, and performance. 
 

Flow, a 2011 painting by Monkman, reimagines the grand tradition of nineteenth-century North American landscape painting through a contemporary Indigenous lens. The sweeping mountain vista is rendered with meticulous naturalism—yet Monkman subverts the colonial narrative that such imagery historically upheld. In the foreground, a group of Indigenous figures, some in canoes, occupy the idyllic shoreline with calm authority, reclaiming presence within a landscape once depicted as “untamed” or “empty.” The central whirlpool that disrupts the glassy lake introduces an element of mystery and tension, hinting at unseen forces and histories beneath the surface. By merging romantic landscape aesthetics with surreal and symbolic interventions, Monkman challenges the viewer to reconsider how the land has been represented throughout history. The painting exemplifies his ongoing dialogue with art history, Indigenous resilience, and the rewriting of cultural memory.
 

Flow was included in a 2012 exhibition, Kent Monkman: Miss America at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal. On the gallery’s website, Steve Loft and Rachelle Dickinson write of the show: 
 

“For Monkman, history is not a static, repressive regime of misleading stereotypes and tired art historical tropes, it is a lithe medium ripe for re-imagining and re-population. In Miss America, Monkman has chosen as his inspiration Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. His reworking of Tiepolo’s ceiling cycle The Four Continents (1754), specifically America at Treppenhaus, Residenz at Würzburg, Germany, challenges the euro-western ‘Age of Reason’ through a re-casting of allegory and classism into a Canadian Indigenous context. Tiepolo’s cycle, epitomized, not only the lush allegorical language of Renaissance and Baroque conceptualizations of the world, but also the humanist philosophies that characterize the Enlightenment–the aesthetics of Classical Antiquity coupled with the search for imperial truth through reason to bring order from chaos. Likewise, Monkman, in appropriating these compositional, syntactic and iconographical tools, piles luscious fully-fleshed Indigenous and Non-Indigenous bodies into a climax of the Americas that simultaneously assert and undermine the ‘rationalism’ of the Age. 

By Indigenizing the Euro-western canon he creates a tragic-comedy of multiple entendre, played out in a realm of mythic illusions, conscious and unconscious desires, myriad reflections on socio-cultural violence... and acts of pure magic. He creates masterworks of subversion and sensuality, responding to and engaging an anti-colonial discourse steeped in the enduring of rationalism and imperialism within contemporary and historical imagination. These are constructions of presence that disentangle existing paradigms, bringing attention to the exclusiveness of popularly prescribed history. Monkman’s figures posit a profound Indigenization of the landscape in a way unimaginable to art historical dogmatists. His is an 'Americas' peopled by robust bodies grappling within colonial imperial knowledge–no one is exempt.”