Red dresses raise awareness for missing women

EDMONTON - The dresses are all different. There are short, flirty, party dresses, long, dated, work dresses, frumpy polyester numbers.

And they are all red. Each one bold and striking, a series of eerie slashes of red marking the cold, winter landscape around the University of Alberta. The dresses jump in the breeze, striking in their emptiness.

Andrea Menard says some people who see the art installation are moved to tears.

“It’s amazing the way this connects with people,” she says. “The response has been so powerful.”

The REDress Project is an installation first conceived by Winnipeg artist Jamie Black about two years ago, and which has been hung in a number of locations around the country ever since.

Black says the piece is a way of visually representing the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and helping to get people talking about the issue.

“I think this raises awareness in a different way, and a different group of people can access it,” she said. “People instantly connect to it and become emotionally involved in it,” she said.

Black says she was inspired after seeing work other artists were doing about missing and murdered indigenous women in Colombia. Her first installation of the REDress piece involved hanging 100 dresses around the University of Winnipeg.

Andrea Menard, the Aboriginal student adviser at the U of A, said she read an article about the installation and knew she wanted to bring it to the Edmonton campus.

She and a colleague hung some red dresses last year. This year, they brought Black to Edmonton to do a full installation.

With the help of the Goodwill charity and private donations, the women gathered hundreds of red dresses, which are now being hung around the U of A campus.

As an Aboriginal woman herself, Menard said hanging the dresses is an intense experience, as she thinks about Aboriginal women who have been slain and the hundreds of others who are still missing in Canada.

“As I was hanging those dresses, I was thinking about those women outside in the cold,” she said. “Standing out there in the snow in my boots, I was thinking about them.”

Menard said numerous people have stopped to ask the women what the project is about, and are deeply moved when they understand what the dresses symbolize.

“People are responding,” she said. “They are shocked, but they are open to it.”

Black says she hopes the work can contribute to a larger dialogue about how sexism, racism, and colonialism have led to violence against Indigenous women around the world.

“I’m really trying to create educational opportunities, and opportunities for critical thinking,” she said. “To even walk away knowing that violence against Aboriginal women is an issue, that’s a lot. That’s the first step.”

Even after hanging hundreds of dresses, Black said the weight of what the dresses symbolize has not ceased.

“It doesn’t ever stop having an impact. They still give me the same feeling that they did at the beginning, a feeling of being haunted, and being reminded that the violence continues,” she said.

The REDress installation will remain around the university site for two weeks. Black will lead a tour of the site on Monday, starting at 5 p.m. at the faculty of Native studies.