Mentored Studio

January 2022 Critique

Experiments, Mentored Studio, Painting, Reviews, Sculpture

A Review of Fall 2021

 

Trans-Cultural Aesthetics

During Jen Hall’s Visual & Critical Studies class, I became interested in the concept of transcultural aesthetics – the melding of Indigenous and Euro-Western aesthetics in my work. Below is an excerpt of my statement, developed during the latter part of the semester:

“My art is trans-cultural; its themes and processes are situated between my Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritages. The materials I use, the concepts I explore, the themes that drive my art practice are situated in both worlds; I look for ways to meld the two together into a whole structure. Through my dual growing up experience, I learned both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of seeing and making, and these elements are fused together in everything I make.”

 

Print Making

I was able to take the Graduate Print Portfolio class, this past semester, as my elective. I had very little instruction on print prior to this class and have been wanting to explore print as a medium for several years. The class did not disappoint.

Along with the exploration of multiples, I also spent a lot of time exploring multi-layering, transparency, embossment and debossment, and fabric printing. The fabric was then cut, pieced, and quilted to further explore embossing through quilting. I find quilting interesting in that it creates a whole from many smaller pieces. Quilts are also a type of blanket, usually created by women in a domestic situation and I’m interested in pursuing this direction.

 

23 Pairs of Shovel Shaped Incisors

I’ve been thinking specifically about the visibility and invisibility of the Indigenous body, both in my own identity as a white passing person, and on a macro level within the population of the United Stated. One of my Indigenous features is my shovel shaped incisors. The shoveling is not visible from the front so it really hits on the visible/invisible concept.

For this work in progress, I made a mold of my front teeth, got my dentist to send me x-rays of my front teeth roots, and then carved up a set from which I created a mold and cast 23 pairs, calling back to the 23 pairs of chromosomes that humans have. I’m currently thinking through how I want to move forward with this so that I can hit both the idea of chromesomes and the idea of the elk tooth dress, which is a Northern Plains dress worn by women on which are sewn the front teeth of elk; the teeth indicate the prowess of the hunter as well as the “wealth” of the family. The dresses are worn only by women so there is also an identity aspect.

Painting Practice

Not much has happened in my painting practice other than experimenting with analogous color palettes based on some  of the printing I did this semester. Landscape has always been an important part of my painting practice so I concentrated on that in these works.

Bead Work

I am continuing with this series. Previous pieces can be seen here.

This particular series shows a specific melding of Indigenous (beads, pattern, process) and non-Indigenous (contour “drawing”, realism).

June 2021 Preview

Experiments, Mentored Studio, Painting, Reviews, Sculpture

Statement/Introduction

My work explores my identity and experiences as a mixed blood person, fusing Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of seeing and making in order to navigate the space between.

Born and raised in Northwestern Montana, I grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation. My father was Qlispe’, Seli’š, and Ksanka (Upper Kalispel, Bitterroot Salish, and Kootenai) and my mother was the daughter of non-Indigenous settlers who moved to the reservation in the 1920s when it was opened for white settlement. I grew up with access to these two different worlds and to their histories and traditions.

My work creates “stories” that investigate concepts of erasure, kinship, belonging, transition, transformation, reclamation, and ambiguity. My work also celebrates the resilience and survivance of Indigenous people, giving voice to that part of me that has survived and thrived. I consider myself and my work as a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, between Western European art and Indigenous art, and between the past and the future.

 

Current Projects and Works-In-Progress

Boundaries Project: The Impact of Loss of Place
Place and identity are inextricably linked for Indigenous people. These “hides”, made from ripped up and reassembled facsimile maps of Montana circa 1881, are stretched and lashed to whitewashed wood frames with the official treaty language used by the US government to create each reservation located in the State. Indian peoples were ripped from their larger territory and confined to the much smaller reservation which was not enough territory to sustain their way of life. They often did not understand the full language of the treaties they signed and were expected to change from hunters to farmers almost over night,  This work directly refers to this process by referencing the skin of an animal which has been removed and then stretched out to tan so that it can be changed and used for a different purpose. 

The blood red painted faces of Indian people, splattered on the “hides” takes advantage of the human brain’s propensity to see faces – which, once seen, can’t be unseen – pushing against the purposeful amnesia regarding the US history of its treatment of Indian peoples and the idea that Indian people are invisible or “extinct”. The “hides” and  “blood” are stand-ins for Indian bodies, referring to US government policy on blood quantum – dictating who is and isn’t “Indian” in order to allot reservation resources.

Plans for the Future
I’m currently workshopping installation ideas. I wasn’t happy that the viewer is looking down on these so I am currently thinking through a different install approach. The drawing represents the current idea that I’m working at the moment. 

These pieces have always been representative of the Indigenous body so I decided to really lean into that (the drawing). One of the reasons these have faces is to humanize the people to whom the trauma of removal happened. Elevating the pieces to eye level in a way that suggests a human body supports that representation. This taller install would also take up more space and would confront the viewer in ways the floor install just doesn’t. 

 

Beaded Portraits: Counting Coup on Curtis
As a medium, beads are a symbol of resilience, survivance, and thriving for Indigenous people. Post First Contact, Indigenous peoples readily adopted European glass beads as an art form and took the medium to artistic heights not attained in Europe at the time – taking control of a European medium and making it their own. 

The legacy of Edward S. Curtis is a problematic one. So many of his photos don’t note the name of the subject. The photo title is the name he gave them, stripping a part of their Indigenous identity and renaming them in a non-Indigenous way. The Curtis photo “Flathead female type”, which is the basis for one of these pieces, was especially painful to me. This was a Bitterroot Salish woman photographed by Curtis who used only her image for his own purposes. She might be an ancestor, she might not. I don’t know because her name was lost. 

In these beaded portraits, the whole impetus is about “renaming” the subject from Edward S. Curtis’ dehumanizing titles to something more Indigenous. This is done most directly with the title of the work – Sunwoman. But the beads, their dimensionality, and their colors also function as a kind of language which renames and reclaims these people. Beads and color, especially in the way I have used them, mark this subject as “Indigenous”. The material “names” the subject and “identifies” the subject. This woman has become more than just a nameless person in a flat, black and white photo taken by a non-Indigenous person for Colonial/Capitalist reasons bankrolled by a 19th century robber baron (JP Morgan).

Plans for the Future
I have just recently finished the second portrait and have prepared the ground for the third one, based on a photo entitled “Nespelem Maiden” which has all sorts of problematic connotations that I’d like to address (the fetishizing use of the word “maiden”). These portraits, at this size, take about 55 to 60 hours – it’s a slow medium to work in. So I am not anticipating getting this latest portrait finished until well into Fall semester. 

 

Painting: Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Fusion.
Continuing a trajectory that I started last Fall semester, I am exploring ways of using pigments, color, subject matter, method (reductive and additive), and symbiology in my painting practice. I recently attended the Native Pigments Revealed symposium a few weeks ago and have come away with a renewed interest in exploring the pre-Contact Indigenous painting traditions of Qlispe’ and Seli’š people. The idea that earth pigments – rock, plants, etc. – tie a work to a certain place because the materials have been gathered from that place is really appealing to me. Much of my painted work contains visual references, overt and covert, to landscape. I’d like to push this further. 

Plans for the Future
The images below represent what I’m experimenting with right now. The left most painting was done right after the Native Pigments Revealed symposium and represents the direction I’d like to go with foraged pigments. Finding pigments in the landscape, making them into paint. And then painting with them. This field of enquiry will very likely extend through Summer, through Fall semester, and into Spring semester. 

 

Print
I started thinking about the use of print in my practice when I started working with the facsimile 1881 Montana map and the treaties that established the reservations in the state. These were printed works on paper – in some cases, mass produced in order to disseminate information. I’m interested in this communication method when thinking about the purposeful amnesia of the general American public with regards to Indigenous people and history. I’ve also branched out to thinking about print and symbols, especially the use of multiples, to create meaning and to tie that into my current work. I’m still investigating this tangent by creating my own blocks for printing/stamping and thinking about the symbols I want to weave into images. I really like the idea of using one symbol to build a portrait or picture of a subject in a Pointillist manner.

Plans for the Future
Along with continuing these lines of thought, I am taking a Print workshop this Summer and the Graduate Print Portfolio elective this Fall. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this focused time. 

Drawing

A regular part of my practice includes almost daily concept sketching but I have recently gone back to creating drawings as “finished” work. Like my painting practice, this is another area where I am exploring style and symbolism to create specific messages. 

Experimentation: Quilling with Paper

There is a European tradition of “quilling” with curls of paper which looks nothing like Indigenous quilling with porcupine quills. I’ve been experimenting with quilling paper in the Indigenous quilling tradition. These are tests, using treaty text, to see how much of the wording can be read and how I can manipulate the text. This is an offshoot of the Boundaries project lashings which are vinyl encased strips of treaty text. It has a very quill-like materiality to it so I wondered how it would behave when quilled onto a surface.

And, As Always, Long Walk…
I still continue to work on this very large bead sculpture. Currently, all foam cores have been cast and I am in the process of skinning each bead with hydrocal, sanding them, and then painting them. It takes time for the clear, top coat to cure so I’ll be working on these, this summer, in between all the other projects and school work.

The 130th anniversary of the removal of the Bitterroot Salish from the Bitteroot valley is October 15th, 2021. I am hoping to finish this by then but may not make that deadline.

For a more in-depth discussion of this project, please go here.

End of Semester Conversation – May 8th, 2021

Mentored Studio, Reviews

 

Spring Semester Initial studio objectives:

  • continue to work towards ways of making that more fully integrated my chosen mediums with whatever message I might be expressing.
  • research into painting traditions of the Bitterroot Salish and, ancillary that, the painting traditions of Northwest Coast, Plateau, and Plains tribes as these were points of contact for trade with the Bitterroot Salish.
  • continue to work my way through oral histories of the Bitterroot people, some of which goes into depth on the type of pigments available, how to harvest them, what their significance was, and how they were used.
  • I would like to more fully pull “traditional” aspects of NA painting into my contemporary practice.
  • working to better write about my work.

Long-term goals:

  • Consider and explore concepts of monumentalism, memory, and sacredness through various narrative methods as well as building on what I have discovered from Fall semester.

 

Reflections on process, new thinking, etc.

The Medium Is The Message vs. The Medium Supports The Message.

I wasn’t satisfied with the original aphorism so I changed it. I disliked that the original statement centered the medium over the message. For my work, the message is as important (if not more so) than the medium. The changed aphorism better resonates with me as I consider what it is that my mediums might say, what it is that I want my work to say, and how best I can tie those two aspects of my practice together.

Editing to create a clear, strong message in the work.

I realized, this semester, that I am prone to muddying things up by trying to push too many messages into my work. So I’ve been purposely focusing on the one message I want a piece to communicate and then working to stay focused on that.

Artistic References

I took the opportunity to attend a number of Visiting Artist talks. The two which stood out most for me were Nicholas Galanin and Curtis Talwst Santiago. The way in which they both approached identity through their work and the way in which Nicholas Galanin talked about his thinking and process were really informative. Both artists gave me ideas for how to rethink or think differently about my art practice and the way in which materials and focused message work in tandem to create a solid piece. 

Remaking The Thing I Don’t Like Into Something I Do Like.

During one meeting with my mentor, I told a story from when I was a little girl. Beads were scarce in the area so I had to come up with different ways of obtaining them. There was a dime store in my home town that sold “Indian bead work” to tourists. This bead work wasn’t locally made; it was probably made in China or somewhere else overseas. The pieces were generic but colorful and cheap. So I would buy a few of them at a time, take them home, painstakingly pull them apart, sort the beads by color, and then use them to make something I did like. I realized that a lot of what I am doing right now speaks to this urge to take something I don’t like (history, historical amnesia, identity, loss of culture, loss of territory) and make it into something I do like. Most of what I am focused on currently is speaking directly to pushing against the purposeful amnesia of Indigenous history in this country. And I am focused on remaking with the beaded portrait of the Flathead woman from Curtis’ photograph. I’m also considering delving more deeply into Indigenous Futurism where I take apart the history I don’t like and re-imagine it in a way that I do like.

 

Current Studio Outcomes, Experiments, Explorations, Concerns. 

I am mostly satisfied with my studio work this semester. I didn’t get as much completed physically as I would have liked but I did a lot of conceptual thinking, writing, and reading. All of which takes time. I did find it difficult to balance a more writing/reading studio focus with the Artists Writing class. My plan had been to do a writing focused studio mentorship next Spring as well but I’m rethinking that.

Continuing work from last Fall was mostly focused on the Boundaries Project, Beaded Portraits, and The Long Walk. New and experimental work was comprised of The Blood Quantum project, Treaty Quillwork experiments, and some new thoughts on drawing as an endpoint.


Historical/Contemporary Research Undertaken This Semester.

  • I began delving more deeply into family history, family stories, etc. as a way to “speak” with and “listen” to my ancestors.
  • I continued to read through published oral histories of my tribe to look for references to colors and pigments.
  • I’ll be attending a local NW Coast Indigenous pigment symposium at the end of May.


Annotated Bibliography/List of Readings

  • I’m still continuing to add to the annotated bibliography when time permits. I’m currently searching for readings that talk about non-Colonized Art Theory. 
  • I’ve kept a list and copies of articles that my mentor asked me to read or, in some cases, re-read. These include Barthes (Rhetoric of the Image), bell hooks (The Oppositional Gaze), Alleva (Reception), Donnelly (Indigenous Futures), and Winterson (Art Objects). 

 

Current Studio Work:

The Boundaries Project (WIP). Materials: wood, paper, canvas, maps, iron nails. Iron oxide acrylic paint. Dimensions variable.

This sculpture/installation project started last Fall. The initial idea was to rip up facsimiles of a Montana map, circa 1881, reassemble the pieces into Montana reservation shapes, and then splatter blood colored paint on the shapes to form faces. I felt that, right from the start, this initial idea was fairly solid. I liked what it said about ripping up a huge territory and reassembling it into a small space that didn’t make sense. I liked that the viewer clued into these being maps but that, on closer inspection, the maps made no sense. I liked the physicality of ripping something up as I felt that spoke to the entire process of establishing and then forcing Indigenous people onto reservations. I also liked the idea of splatters in Iron oxide which is an ancient pigment used globally by humans for thousands of years. I took this idea still further to take advantage of how the human brain looks for faces which spoke to the invisibility of Indigenous people in America. Once the viewer saw the face in the blood, they would not be able to un-see it.

Where this project became tricky was when I moved on to thinking through how I wanted to frame these pieces. I went through several iterations, added items and then removed those items, and so forth. Finally, after a conversation with my mentor this semester, I did some free writing to explore what it was that I was trying to say with these and came to realize that the reassembled pieces looked like hides – the idea that a hide is a stand-in for the body and that it is a way of identifying a being also came to the fore. Once I had that idea on board, I was able to move forward and think about how hides were obtained and prepared which led to this framing concept of hide stretcher frames. The reassembled pieces became hides that stood for the previous life of Indigenous people which were now removed and being processed on white washed wood frames. The language of the various treaties was used to make lashings which bound and stretched these pieces to that frame.

Boundaries Project Images:


Blood Quantum Project (WIP). Materials: Ink on paper, dimensions variable. Done in an analogous palette of reds (Iron oxides, vermilion, etc.)

So much of modern Indigenous American identity is dictated by blood quantum – what percentage of Indian blood, listed on the Certified Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB), a person can show that they have. It leads to a very colonial way of thinking about Indigenous belonging, Indigenous culture, who is “enough” and who isn’t enough to claim Indigeneity. This system was imposed on Indian people by the Federal government as a way to measure “Indian-ness” through a construct of race. Eventually, through this policy, the government planned that Indians would breed themselves out of existence and the federal government would no longer have to uphold legal duties and treaty obligations. The damage that this system does to Indian identity is immeasurable. Indians are the only minority in the US that are required to prove their minority status. It’s a kind of slow genocide that was begun in the 1800s and continues to this day. Blood quantum was a very important part of many of my ancestors’ identity. These portraits of people I am closely related to speaks to how these fractions, based on different relationships, ancestry, and government control were an embedded part of their identity. Just as it is for me.

This project is done by taking a stamp which has the blood quantum amount of the person and then using Pointilism to create the portrait. The current incarnation is a bit unsatisfying. In thinking about how blood quantum is a form of erasure, I think the portraits are too defined. The next iteration will be much less defined; almost as if the person is dissolving.

Secondary to this thought is that the portrait of the woman emerging from the herd of buffalo feels like a different direction than these blood quantum portraits and should be its own distinct project. In that portrait, the woman is made of buffalo and that is a kind of celebratory idea. So rather than using my ancestors for the blood quantum portraits, which I’ve been having some issues with, I will use them for portraits similar to the red buffalo woman.  

Blood Quantum Images:


Beaded Portraits: Materials: canvas, Pellon, glass beads, and thread. 8.5 inches diameter.

I have a love/hate relationship with Edward S. Curtis’ work. On the one hand, the photos of indigenous people are precious in that they are a historical record of Indigenous Americans. On the other, most are so stage managed and created from a non-Indigenous point of view. In many ways, Curtis’ work was meant to show that Indigenous people were a vanishing culture and that they were less sophisticated, less educated, and less civilized than non-Indigenous Americans. For this beaded portrait, I decided to reclaim the humanity and Indigeneity of this person – who is listed in Curtis’ portfolio simply as “Flathead Female Type”. The title dehumanizes this woman by naming her as more of a specimen, a curiosity, than a human being. I wanted to remake her portrait in a way that humanized her and in a way which was more Indigenous so that she wouldn’t continue to only be known only by that title. There are several portraits with this kind of titling in Curtis’ work. I’m planning on doing a few more of these beaded portraits of them as well.

Beaded Portrait Images:


The Long Walk (WIP). Materials: cast foam, hydrocal, acrylic paitng, and paracord. When this sculpture is finished, it will be 37 feet long x 24 inches wide x 3 inches thick. Each bead is 3.5 inches diameter x 2 inches thick.

I continue to work on this very large sculpture. As of this week, 1690 cores have been cast, 500 cores have been skinned, and 300 beads have been painted. I’m currently in the skinning phase – adding a layer of reinforced hydrocal to each cast foam core so that the surface is smooth and paintable. My goal to finish this piece is October 15th of this year – the 130th anniversary of the removal of the Bitterroot Salish from the Bitterroot valley. It’s a fairly simple piece with a nicely focused message. The medium of giant beads elevates the piece into the realm of sculpture; which avoids the art world penchant for labeling Indigenous work as “craft”. The size also acts as a monument to the Salish while at the same time reclaiming gallery floor space and forcing the viewer to confront it and move around it. It will be installed at the King Street Station in Seattle, hanging from the rafters, flowing down the wall, and out into the gallery space. The dashes represent footsteps on the red road. There are a few aspects I am still working my way through but conceptually, I am very satisfied with it.

Long Walk Images:


Drawing: Hands/As An Endpoint

Drawing has always been a means to an end for me. Mid summer, last year, I began to look at my drawings and consider how they functioned as stand-alone work. I really liked they way they operated and began to consider how I could work that into painting. The reductive painting experiments I did last Fall were a direct result of this line of thinking. This semester, I started to consider drawing as a finished work. All of the compositions are circular – this is a response to thinking about how Time is viewed by many Indigenous peoples as a less linear concept than it is for modern Western European and American culture. I also focused on just hands as a means to think about how message can be conveyed through simple gesture by both the subject and the medium of graphite. 

Drawing: Ancestors Studies

I started these drawings as a prelude to the Blood Quantum project. Many of the photos I’ve been able to obtain of my ancestors have been very old and grainy. Some were taking in the late 1800s so the amount of information available was limited. I’ve been working on creating portraits of several individuals as a way to enlarge them without losing details. In the course of doing these drawings, I found it interesting to see facial characteristics that have been passed down through subsequent generations. As an example, when doing the portrait of my great grandmother, it almost felt like I was doing a self portrait. 

Painting

Not a lot of painting happened this semester. When I did paint, I was engaged in color exercises, concept ideas, and a different method of reductive painting which mirrors my drawings. Or, I just painted for the fun of it. 

Traditional Quillwork with Treaties

When I started creating the lashing for the Boundaries project, there was a lot of vinyl cuttoffs. Materially, they reminded me of porcupine quills so I experimented with them to do some traditional quillwork. This led to some thoughts on how I might manage composing the treaty words so that the text was mostly readable while being quilled. I’m very undecided about this aspect. Since quillwork is something of beauty, I feel that using treaty words may not work. Instead, I may look for other words that are more about survivance and use those instead.