Indigenous
Artists Write the World at South Puget Sound Community College
By Alec Clayton
Published in the Weekly Volcano, Feb. 28, 2019
Visitation posters from Super Futures Haunt Collective |
This year’s 11th
Annual Native American Art Exhibition at South Puget Sound Community College is
comprised
work from a year-long project called Yəhaẃ
that includes performances, videos,
storytelling and works of visual art. The exhibition title is And Now We Know: Indigenous Artists Write
the World. An exhibition flyer explains the project is “inspired by the
Coast Salish story of indigenous people from all tribes uniting around a common
cause and lifting up the sky together.”
More than 200
indigenous artists are participating throughout the area, but not all to be
found in any one venue. The shows are held
in many places, including Seattle Art Museum Community Gallery, Alma Mater
Tacoma, Chief Seattle Club, King Street Station and more.
Visitors to the
gallery at SPSCC should be prepared to spend a lot of time watching videos,
listening to audio presentations, reading explanatory texts and carefully
studying the art, and it is advisable to spend some time studying the website
at yehawshow.com before going to the show. The work is not easy to grasp and
demands effort on the part of the viewer, but even if you do not understand it
all, it would be worth the effort.
One large wall is
completely covered with posters from Demian DinéYazi’s “Decolonize Feminism”
poster series. The posters fill the wall from floor to ceiling and each
presents black and white images of Native American women with the printed words
“Indigenous,” “Feminism” and “Decolonize.” The posters are arranged to create
patterns in the manner of Andy Warhol’s repetitive images. For example, one
poster picturing a group of women is darker than all the rest, and it is
repeated in such a way as to create diagonal bands across the wall. Other such
patterns can be detected with careful observation. By way of this patterning
and repetition, the message of decolonizing Native women is driven home like a
hammer blow.
Mounted on the
wall on top of DinéYazi’s poster series are two video monitors that use the
posters as wallpaper. In Vi Hilbert’s
“Lifting the Sky”, a woman tells the story of tribes coming together to do just
that task. Sky Hapinka’s video, “Wa Wa,”
features speakers of Chinuk Wawa, a Native language from the Pacific Northwest.
Another piece
having to do with language is a group of four linocuts on paper by Whess Harmon
with decorative letters spelling out phrases that are almost unreadable because
of the complexity of the letters. These works constitute an intriguing puzzle
that is lovely to look at because of — as in the poster series — variety of
shapes and color within repetitive patterns.
The dominant
compositional trope of repetition can be seen again in Catherine Cross Vehara’s
“Notes to Self,” a series of silkscreen prints of stop signs and electric fans
with slashes of color that in many instances are purely abstract shapes and in
other instances depict animals or people. The contrasts and similarities of
images is attention-
grabbing, but the
meanings of these images is not clear.
There is a lot to see in this show. Conceptually, aesthetically,
politically and historically, this show demands careful study. The gallery also
hosts a library with selections of works by local Native writers.
And Now We Know,
noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, through March 8, South Puget Sound
Community College, Kenneth J Minnaert Center for the Arts Gallery, 2011 Mottman
Rd. SW. Olympia, https://spscc.edu/gallery
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