Akoka'tssini: April 2011

Thursday, April 7, 2011

I k t o m i

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW)

Medium(s): Micron Pen .005, Sharpie

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Iktomi, in Lakota-Sioux spirituality, is a spiritual deity held in the oral history and storytelling aspect of the Indigenous culture.
He, who takes the form of a spider, is more often then not portrayed as a negative trickster spirit against the people, believed to entangle webs in the lives of people and create a domino effect of unfortunate coincidences, depression, anger, and self-pity. His ability to control people unknowingly like puppet strings to create unfortunate events in the lives of individuals, believed to be preyed on the weak spirited and weak minded.

In everyday communication, it is often said to "have an iktomi on your back" relates to said sudden chain of negative coincidences over a short or long period of time. Often this expression is used towards people who are suffering depression, heavily into alcoholism, or doing things to hurt other people.

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Aside from the quick background of who Iktomi is, I often see him portrayed as said being, shifting between human or specimen. Though I enjoy a more surreal interpretation that shows the predatation aspect of spiders often involving coiling, constriction, and injection. ironically as often as we find spiders in the bathroom, the bathtub to me represented vulnerability as well as most associated with a time when we are usually alone and by ourselves.
The smaller side on the left depicts a house fly being attacked, which scales the humans down to the same level of prey.
The only faces of the piece are arachnids, where the human ones are shrouded in the constricting organic-like vines, and the other's skull remains at the bottom of his feet, replaced by old, rotten. and broken picture frames..which represents my drastic change in identity-shifting.

With currently an "iktomi on my back" for at least 4 months now, I basically drew what it feels like, which is rather new for me personally as an artist. My works have usually been socio-political at the very least. Though "Afternoon Tea" was as such, the atmosphere and "milieu" of the piece was much more darker and serious than I had done before, and it extremely appealed to me...which I believe will result in more of these surreal ink works from now on.

The official end of my "Indigasphyxia" thesis (the impact of colonization and technology on indigenous culture), and a shift towards a "Milieu" focus (personal experiences in my environment, and being a prey of Iktomi since December)

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."

Thursday, April 7, 2011

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