trade the memory of this night 8 x 80″ 2020
tracing paper, conte, birch tree seeds, repurposed fox fur, acrylic hair, plastic spoons,
cotton cord, beading thread, carpet nails & repurposed bicycle inner tube rubber on wood panel
title poem: ‘love is not all’ by Edna St. Vincent Malloy
click on thumbnails below to enlarge & scroll in lightbox.
This piece continues a few aesthetic and metaphoric themes within my practice.
In recent years, beginning with the dark matter pieces in my interTribal series, I’ve been making a number of dark works. The darkness is a layered acknowledgement – of things that are painful, saddening or angering to navigate, and of the mysterious and unfathomable potential that the Universe is largely composed of. It also acknowledges the nighttime, which I love, especially when I’m on the land or in the studio. I also see their darkness as a metaphor for the duplicity of human nature, and the importance of being honest about all aspects of ourselves, and embracing the more painful or uncomfortable parts of ourselves, and our his/herstories, in order to maintain, or return to, both individual and communal health.
The seeds in this piece are gathered from birch trees in a small forested area in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) that I frequently go to sit and connect with the earth and ground myself. Being tormented by noise pollution is something I’m constantly challenged with in NYC, and its hard to find quiet even within the park. This small grove of trees is one of the few places I can usually find some peace. While sitting in this spot on a spring day during the pandemic, I noticed how these small seeds had been washed off the trees by the rain, and the beautiful way hundreds of them rested on the leaves of the plants growing under them they’d fallen onto. I gathered some and icorporated them into this piece. I regularly incorporate seeds and other plant and animal materials gathered from the land into my artworks. I think of these pieces with seeds, roots, antlers and shells as collaborations with non-human artists.
Adorning wall pieces in fringe made from inner tube rubber is another recurring element in my work, as is draping sculptural elements off their surfaces onto the floor. A few other examples of earlier pieces with these ‘exaggerated drapes’ as I call them, are golden vine, and black braid, as well as the more recent gathering 2772 (money tree seed version) which is part of my nikihk series.
As a way of navigating, magnifying and questioning contemporary colonized environments, and forms of re-Indigenization, I like to play with the elements of cultural adornment in my pieces in a way that are both playful and sensual, both honoring and a little tricksterish.
The title of this piece continues my long-standing practice of naming artworks with lines from poems or songs, and/or incorporating them into the artworks themselves.
(There is another Native artist who now uses Settler song titles and lyrics a lot in his work, having even used some of the same songs I’ve focussed on, like amazing grace and I will survive. In the interest of advocating for myself I want to clarify that I started doing this – and other things- in a very unique context. He followed.
The same is also the case with the exaggeratedly long fringe I use.
This was something uique to my practice – though it is now being used by both this artist
and another of my contemporaries).