entangled drawings

click on any image to enlarge & scroll in lightbox.

wayakesk = tree bark (Plains Cree)

This short IG video is of me working on ‘entangled skins’ during my residency on Governors Island in the fall of 2020.

I began making the ‘entangled’ drawings during the heart of the COVID lockdown and the BLM protests in NYC. Both the pandemic and the protests magnified some of the layered challenges of Indigenous experience, particularly the continuation of pervasive omissions of Native presence, histories and voices in the conversations and dynamics of both of these situations.

For while, at last, and importantly, harms against black communities and individuals were being publicly called out and acknowledged, the precedent historical violence and genocide perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, which continues to this day in pervasive practices and paradigms within contemporary society, remained largely ignored, even within conversations about historical discrimination and reparations on First Nations territories.

And while COVID instigated many conversations about historical pandemics, over and over I heard the 1918 influenza outbreak and other pandemics within Settler communities discussed as being the most devastating, while the purposefully introduced post-contact smallpox pandemics experienced by First Nations were, again, almost entirely omitted. This despite the deaths and devastation of the latter far outnumbering and outweighing the acknowledged, Settler ones.

Meanwhile, COVID also became a catalyst for both relief and increase in harms against Mother Earth, magnifying yet another overridingly dysfunctional aspect of Western/Settler culture.

These situations affirmed my understanding of how all these issues are deeply entangled and cannot be resolved until the foundational issues are acknowledged and addressed. One the most important, yet most repressed, is the colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples and how inseparable this is with the health and survival of the land and all our relations.

The entangled drawings are also/(connectedly) expressive of my own experiences of trauma and the navigation of both the impacts and healing processes, and again, how my experiences ‘entangle’ with those of so many Native people and within Settler histories. Like most First Nations people, trauma has been a layered and repeated challenge in my life, present as both intergenerational and lifetime/personal experience, including but not limited to the absence of my father due to racism and addiction, racially and non-Native culturally informed childhood abuse, separation from my culture, injury, chronic health issues and physical pain, tragic loss of human and animal family members, multiple physical, verbal and energetic assaults, particularly in relation to simply being myself and/or advocating for personal or cultural respect, a long relationship containing (non-physical yet still very impactful) abuse, and the multiple, deep harms of repeated, long-term, unsanctioned and unacknowledged appropriations (largely perpetrated through the ‘lifting and remixing’) of signature elements of my artistic practice by artist peers (2 community members/previous exhibition cohorts in particular, which is additionally impactful as a heartbreaking form of Native-on-Native harm akin to lateral violence).

In recent years, my deep dive into understanding trauma, both through research and post-assault trauma councelling (ironically, in my alternative experiences in trauma therapy with non-Native therapists, I experienced discrimination) has helped me to understand numerous things about my own and broader community reactions to these experiences, including how when trauma is layered the impacts are often exponential. The layers that are common to my work and are metaphorically layered in and of themselves, also allude to these layers of trauma.

Yet despite being a response to these deeply difficult dynamics, like all of my work, made through intuitive creative practices, these drawings embody the transmutation of that which seems unresolvable or unbearable into artworks containing and representing resiliency, beauty, healing and continuance.

Initially begun as a cathartic means of coping, I found that when making these repetitive, ragged yet rhythmic gestural expressions of pain, rage, sadness, frustration and grief, with time and effort the drawings become images also containing and expressing lyricism, re/connection, strength and balance. In this way they relate closely to the healing quality that the washes of paint that so many of my paintings have contained for many years now. They also represent how all the issues and damages happening on Turtle Island and the planet now are entangled and cannot be resolved until the histories and (continued) impacts of colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples has first been fully acknowledged and accounted for.

Some of the entangled drawings are adorned and/or incorporate materials, elements and interactions present in other painting and sculpture series. I also use tree bark rubbings and emboss printing in some of the drawings, reconfiguring these imprints from land-gathered or culturally significant materials into the fem-centric tribal geometries also common to my painting practice. The drawings often also contain the interrupted, irregular, and/or exploding chevrons that are another signature element of my work (so, to the abovementioned artists, please don’t try and hijack them, and/or this drawing style, either. It would be just a little too obviously ‘real’ and disrespectful/damaging this time, especially in addition to all the previous ‘lifting’ activity. Parfait par exemple:).

Some drawing titles contain names of characters in audiobooks I sometimes listen to while in the studio. This connects to the poets whose lines I use as some of the putting on beads & feathers series and song titles and/or lines, and affirmations used other, earlier artworks/titles, such as the antler, natura directus et delectabilis, and Affirn/Nation series and early performance works like 10,000 years and the Earth and Myself.

I often identify and empathize with certain attributes or experiences of these characters, statements, healing modalities, authors and/or stories in very personal ways, often from purposefully sought out experience, spiritual connection or questing, and/or research, while being simultaneously aware that they contain or express colonialist, disconnected, culturally dysfunctional attitudes, elements or dynamics that are part of the harms incurred against Native people. Again, I reposition them into a connected but alternate Indigenous expression and continuance.

Due to repeated unsanctioned appropriation of signature elements of my work, in the interest of protecting work in vulnerable stages of development, I now keep my newest pieces on a private page until they, and/or other closely related works, have been seen in public venues and/or by my peers and/or arts professionals in a context where there is a public record of the production and timeline of signature elements and artworks in my practice.

Feel free to contact me for more info about this.

Interested curators, collectors or other arts professionals may also contact me to request access to private work webpage/s at winter@winter-brown.com.

Hiy hiy,
Bebonkwe ᐱᐳᐣ

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