500 Year Itch, a self-portrait by Shelley Niro, is featured in a new exhibition at Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada until February 2025.
“Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is the first major retrospective of work by the multimedia artist Shelley Niro, who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve, near Brantford, Ontario. Spanning four decades of her photography, film, painting, installation, sculpture and mixed media practice, the exhibition highlights themes she constantly returns to: Matriarchy, Past is Present, Actors and Family Relations … Her highly empathetic approach moves viewers to understand the issues at hand through her visually impactful and politically powerful manner. She uses parody, feminism and spirituality to examine identity and, in turn, brings political power to the realm of the personal.”
500 Year Itch was created for Niro’s first solo exhibition in 1992, 500 years after Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. She was born in 1955, the same year that The Seven Year Itch was released, in Niagara Falls (the backdrop to another Monroe movie.)
The Seven Year Itch refers to the idea that divorce rates peak in the seventh year of marriage, and of course, Marilyn’s second marriage fell apart while the film was in production – with the iconic ‘subway grate scene’ supposedly a catalyst.
“That’s when partners ask themselves, ‘Will I stay with this marriage or will I leave?'” Niro told CBC. “So it’s like the marriage between native people and the colonisers. Are we going to stick with this or what are we going to do? How [are we] going to resolve the issues that have showed up in these last 500 years?”
By posing as Marilyn, Niro also pokes fun at white beauty standards. She wears unglamorous but practical glasses and a patently false blonde wig, while holding a remote control to operate the electric fan. (In The Seven Year Itch, by contrast, Marilyn stood over a subway grate while a crew member operated the fan from below the grate.)
Niro repurposed the image for 500 Year Triptych, alongside a family photo of her mother from the 1940s and a contemporary self-portrait of the artist wearing a shirt and jeans. She also drew upon 1950s pop culture for The Rebel, in which her mother drapes herself over the roof of a car, slyly referencing the ultimate Hollywood ‘rebel’, James Dean.
Incidentally, The Seven Year Itch begins with an historical prologue depicting a tribe of Manhattan Indians pursuing an attractive young woman (Dorothy Ford) while their wives and children have gone upstate for the summer. Typically for the time, the actors were white and donned ‘redface’ for the scene.
And finally, Marilyn herself briefly visited Vancouver en route to the Canadian Rockies while shooting River Of No Return in 1953. During the layover, she was photographed with Chief Joe Mathias on the Capilano Reserve.
Although the jaunt was most likely a publicist’s ruse, reporters wrote that Marilyn had wanted to meet a ‘real Indian chief’ after seeing so many actors fake it in movies. When they were introduced, Mathias said: ‘You’re that Hollywood woman, ain’t you?’
The Marilyn Report 