Wendy Red Star
PROJECT
For the NGV Triennial, Wendy Red Star has redesigned Gallery Kitchen to become a gathering space inspired by her Four Seasons photographic series, a set of four self-portraits of the artist seated in constructed dioramas among fake plants, animals and natural elements. The animals accompanying Red Star are hunting decoys created to lure real animals, while the photographic backdrops were selected to represent the concept of manifest destiny. This idea promoted and romanticised colonial expansion in nineteenth-century America, including through paintings and visual culture. Within these scenes sits the artist in her traditional elk tooth dress – the only true living thing pictured.
Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria and made possible with the support of a Research Partnership with Deakin University Motion Lab. This project is proudly supported by Deakin University.
ABOUT
Raised in the district of Pryor in Montana, Wendy Red Star’s work grows from the stories passed through her family, the materials she encounters in historical records, and the lineage she carries forward. The places, people and histories that shaped her early life continue to guide her research and artistic process.
Her practice is rooted in sustained attention to inherited stories, to archival traces and to the ways Apsáalooke history lives across generations. She approaches historical materials through the lens of her own lineage, allowing relationships between memory, record and lived experience to emerge through time and close looking. Her work grows from this process of gathering, listening and assembling rather than from any impulse to explain or correct the historical record.
Red Star received her BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been recognised with numerous awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), the MacArthur Fellowship (2024), the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship (2024), and the Infinity Award in Contemporary Photography and New Media (2024). Red Star’s work is held in more than eighty public collections worldwide.