Satirical artist Wendy Red Star is debunking myths and upending clichés about First Nation and Native people. As two exhibitions feature her work, she tells the BBC how she uses "humour as a bridge".

What's wrong with this picture? That may well be a viewer's first response to Wendy Red Star's mind-bending photograph, Winter, on display in the opening gallery of Winter Count: Embracing the Cold, at Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada (NGC). But take another look and you may begin to understand what's actually right about it.

The exhibition juxtaposes works by First Nation artists with those of Canadian settlers, British and European artists from the 19th to 21st Centuries as a way to both celebrate and contemplate the experience of the season from multiple cultural perspectives. In keeping with that theme, the differing ways in which each group perceives and misperceives – as well as sees and doesn't really see – the others is what Red Star is asking us to reflect on in this work.

Born in Billings Montana in 1981 and an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) tribe, Red Star places herself at the centre of her photographic tableau, dressed in the brightly hued traditional tribal attire, which she sewed herself. Featuring elk teeth and beads characteristic of Crow dress, her clothing is historically authentic. But Red Star's forlorn stare compels us to do a double take as we peer at the landscape that surrounds her.

What viewers may at first have assumed would be a panoramic First Nations-themed winter wonderland, on second glance proves instead to be a mordant satire of the clichés of Indigenous life in tune with nature that have become embedded in the Western mind.

In this landscape, the unnatural has replaced the natural. Those are white plastic packing chips, not snowflakes, covering the ground and decoratively dotting the artificial ferns and trees. The pristinely white and perfectly rounded snowball Red Star holds in her hand is a synthetic orb resembling the weightless toy balls used to play catch with toddlers. Fabrications, too, are the spookily wide-eyed owl, ink-black ravens, redder-than-red cardinals, and the death-omen of an ox skull strategically scattered throughout the scene. And the backdrop itself is an illusion – not the great outdoors, but a photomural.

Red Star's sendup is playful, even kitsch. As she said to Aperture, "I was watching a lot of John Waters' movies" at the time she produced the series. She created The Four Seasons photo series – comprising a different photographic panorama for each season – when she was in her mid-20s and living for the first time away from Montana, earning her MFA in sculpture at UCLA in Los Angeles.

As she walked through the Native galleries of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, she felt "super weird," she tells the BBC. "I was seeing people view Crow material, moccasins I think," assuming "that this is the past and there aren't Crow people walking around… This is a weird fantasy dynamic being portrayed here," she thought. "People walk in here thinking they are going to learn the true history" of First Nations, and yet "this does not align with my sense of it".

The BBC reached out to the LA Museum of Natural History about their representation of First Nation people but they did not comment. The museum is now showing a permanent exhibition, LA Reimagined. According to its website, "visitors will discover the ways Native people have shaped Los Angeles, past and present, when they see newly commissioned portraits of Native Americans living in Los Angeles County as well as a video in which community leaders share what it means to be an Indigenous Californian living in LA today."

Red Star........

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