"Where do we draw the Line?"

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Medium(s): 2H Pencil, Pen, Sharpie Pen

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A quick, yet thoroughly and exploratory worked sketch, "Where do we draw the Line?" defines and illustrates that question for Indigenous people on where it is we stand today, technologically, politically, environmentally, medically, every way possible that affects us from the Western world compared to our Old world. The questions are a bit difficult to grasp as I had been researching and reasoning/discussing with a friend on Existentialism. Where is it we, as cultured Indigenous people, place ourselves? As individuals? In this globalized and colonized world where mental and technological assimilation has no preference to race, sex, gender, religion, etc...

The human figure defines an elder, someone of extreme cultural, social, and governmental importance to Indigenous culture.

The figuratively-implied shape out of lines defines a traditional-style horse.

These two one in the same relatives and relations in traditional culture, still amidst the same world, but have become vastly separated in ways that are not recognizable, to the point it is easy to make out the human face in our eyes, but the horse figure almost abstract and unrecognizable unless putting in some visual effort. An abstraction to visually define a broken connection..an old belief and view now apathetically unthought of. This defines symbolically our lost sight of animals as our relatives (symbolically including our earth's place as a whole), as we have become swallowed by cooperate agendas and dependence on colonized needs. We now exist as Indigenous people in a synthetic-nature, where everything is clearly defined with an exact scientific and mathematical answer, purpose, and reason.

I quote from my artistic thesis the part this piece defines visually:
"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 (especially as Indigenous people), 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..."


Where does the line exist between adaptation and absorption? Between integration and imitation? Who defines these lines?

This line is completely individual-based. Which is what this entire piece is created from, individual lines.