Akoka'tssini: "Assimilation Shelter in Sweatlodge"

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

"Assimilation Shelter in Sweatlodge"

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW)

Medium(s): Acrylic, Pen & Ink, Sharpie, String, Tracing and Palette Paper Mix Media

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"Assimilation Shelter in Sweatlodge" is a mixed-media composition I completed in two weeks during my staffing of the Oscar Howe Native American Summer Art Institute (OHSAI) at the University of South Dakota. During the visiting artists of Bunky Echo-Hawk and Roger Broer, I was inspired by the gallery of Northern Plains Indian Art Market collections the Fine Arts department owned during OHSAI. I had never done mixed media in this fashion, nor had I taken a painting seriously. This was the result of ultimate experimentation outside of my comfort zones.

I leaned into the works of abstract by my mark making. Using the teeth on a buffalo jaw, I covered the teeth in paint and dabbed the canvas, which created a very unique and decomposing-looking texture. Aside form painting, I used adhesive spray to directly place my drawing of the sundancers on tracing paper directly onto the canvas. The sundancers being my startingpoint, I expanded outward in the composition from there, like an atomic bomb.

The piece has unlimited symbolism, but will review the major points here. Below is a link of a close-up photo of my pen&ink work alone of the sundancers.
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http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs038.snc4/34268_405896237927_549737927_4365412_3619457_n.jpg
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The Sundance, akoka'tssini, is one of the most sacred and most honorable spiritual practices that can be done in our traditional culture. It is the iconic ceremony that makes us Indigenous people, completely non-western ceremonies that we've done annually every summer for centuries and generations.
THis piece is about the decomposition of it, of the people who should be involved. I incooperated materialistic objects and things related to society that tempt us, but we choose to let overcome who we are freely, based on our own decision-making rather than some adversary thats holding us back. Things that cloud our mind from who it is we are as Native people, and recognizing the fact that it is what we do that makes us Native, not what we happen to be in bloodlines.
The strings off the sundancer connect to a dead tree, to symbolize decomposition of ceremony. Much fighting goes on about who is doing what wrong and it seems everyone individually knows "the right way", nevermind those who do not even attend or recognize the Sundance as a primary event in their life. Hanging from the tree are alcoholic containers and cut braids, to show how many people are no longer connected to the tree, but the reasons they are not there. Addictions, issues, and loss of cultural fundamentalism all relate to why we are not involving or attending ourselves to not just sundance but all red road commitments and ceremonies. A lone cross rooted into the ground showing the dominance of Christianity and other western-origin beliefs that many of my people have turned to.
Traditional symbolism is related to my color choices. Black and white was and is considered an evil color-palette of evil spirit beings that visited and tempted us so long ago. My view is that since we as people have changed, so have they. This belief resulting in my design of traditional evil colors and markings on beer bottles; the direct temptations that destroy us from within.

I combined it all with a Fallout Shelter sign used in the 50's and 60's during the Nuclear-era. As a means to direct people to a safe haven and protection from harm. I'm thinking about doing a series of these with that similar topic. C.D. (Civil Defense) put them out, and figured it'd be fun to twist it to C.D. (Culture Defense). Overall, this piece I believe is the start of a new direction.

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The Artist

MY THESIS - "By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live like it used to. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives away to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - they hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, real to virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection. Technological acceleration does not affect out way of living - it is our new and comprehensive host of life, the environment of living itself. It is not the effect of technology on the environment, culture, economy, religions, etc., but rather that all these categories exist in technology. In this sense technology is new nature. The living environment, old nature, is replaced by a manufactured milieu, an engineered host-synthetic nature. In a real sense, we are off planet, swelling on the lunar surface of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, steel and plastics, engulfed in the atmosphere of radioactive oxygen and electromagnetic vibrations - the soothing aroma of atomic nuclear energy, the soothing lullabies of the machine. The common notion tells us that technology is neutral, that we can use it for good or bad. Though, in my opinion, we do not use technology, we live technology; technology is our way of life. Being sensitive entities, we always have and will become our environment - we become what we see (or may not see), what we hear, what we eat, what we smell, what we touch, etc. Where doubt and questioning is prohibited (indigenous or not), we become, without question, the environment we live in. With our Indigenous origins based in the natural order, should this context radically change, the mysterious nature of the human being shall also radically change - a change that will reflect the transformation of nature itself, whether it be a turning point or vanishing point. Natural diversity becomes a burnt offering, sacrificed to the infinite appetite of technological homogenization. We now live in the fiction of science. We are most definitely now, not in some made-up future, cyborgs. As we always have been, we are at one with our environment - we are technology. In this 'wonderland', freedom becomes the pursuit of our technological, industrial, and material happiness. Our standard of living is predictated on commodity consumption, as the practice our new spirituality is "pray for more". In vehicles of ecstasy, with cinematic engines of inertia at audiovisual speed, trans-port and tele-port blend into one. The beginning becomes the end. The 'port' disappears in the speed of light. The nanosecond, technological speed, transforms reality as it creates an ecstatic phenomena of compelling and unparalleled intensity. By human measure, charismatic technique portends the miraculous, as it engenders the condition of 'exit velocity' - a condition that blurs human perceptions, shatters all meanings, drains all content and breaks our bonds with the earth's natural order. All locations are consumed into the startling terra firma of the image, a demonic conformity that is the genesis of man. In this shadow of the mass, all previous definitions crumble. The 'time' and 'space' of history exist to a homogenized zone of no return. In this supernatural implosion of g-force, human moorings give way, sending humans out-of-orbit into the void of technological space. The loss of original habitat and our subsequent relocation into accelerated space, throws nature into catastrophe, as it engenders traumatic stress syndrome as the now normal condition of post-human existence. Technology, while promising comfort and happiness as its 'result', means power, means control, means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a condition of war that is at once both universal and unseen. The explosive tempo of technology is war; the untellable violence of genocide, relocation and assimilation in technology is war. All of us, are refugees driven from our human and indigenous state."
- 22 year oldart student at the University of South Dakota. Majoring in Fine Arts (double emphasis in Printmaking and Painting), and a minor in American Indian Studies.
- My medium strength would have to be ink mediums such as inkwash, pen & ink, printmaking, lithography, etc. The finer and sharper the point the better. Though I have an increasing strength and interest in color usage with pastels and painting.
- My grandfather was an amazing artist, focusing mostly on landscape and WWII Veteran topics and is well known and highly regarded in the surrounding communities he impacted in central Massachusetts. He spent a lot of his time teaching me to draw what I see, and I've taken that to many different levels.

Oscar Howe Letter to Philbrook Art Center, after being rejected for not being "Indian Art", 1958

"Whoever said that my paintings are not in Traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art, indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. There is also power and strength and individualism [emotional and intellectual insight] in the old Indian paintings. Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of traditional paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, with no right for individualism? Dictated to as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the white man knows what is best for him. Now, even in art, you little child do what we think is best for you, nothing different. Well, I'm not going to stand for it. Indian art can compete with any art in the world, but not as a supressed art. I see so much of the management and treatment of my people, it makes me cry. My father died here about three years ago in a little shack, my two brothers still living there in shacks, never enough to eat, never enough clothing. This is one reason I have tried to keep the fine ways and culture of my forefathers alive, but one could easily become a social protest painter. I can only hope the Art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains."

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

"Assimilation Shelter in Sweatlodge"

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Oscar Howe Letter to Philbrook Art Center, after being rejected for not being "Indian Art", 1958