Cyborg Hybrid Roger (visual artist): "SNIFFER"

KC Adams is a multi-disciplinary artist from Winnipeg. Drawing inspiration from her combined European and Aboriginal heritage, her "Cyborg Hybrids" series explores the relationships between nature and technology, identity and community, and race and culture. For much of her work, Adams has found inspiration in Donna Harroway’s "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), which states that “a cyborg is a creature in a technological, post-gender world free of traditional western stereotypes towards race and gender”. These photographs portray Adams’ friends and colleagues, who are also of Euro-Aboriginal descent, and thus could be said to embody Harroway’s definition of the cyborg. Constructed images that expose their own fabrication, the portraits also provide additional layers of complexity as the artist uses the device of the cyborg to explore notions of cultural hybridity. While mimicking the documentary photographs of Aboriginal Peoples from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the strong, defiant poses of Adams’ subjects both align with and challenge the slogans on the t-shirts. The "Cyborg Hybrids" expose, at one and the same time, the absurdity and the reality of these common stereotypes, creating a space for dialogue on the clichés that surround classifications based on identity and race.