"Assimilation Shelter in Sweatlodge"

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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.

Graphic photoshop work for Screenprint Project

This is a image I made in photoshop and gimp mostly for my next assignment in Printmaking II (screenprinting). We were required to make our own images graphically, posterize them around 9 levels, and use them as referances for our screenprint processes.

I chose a photo of a traditional painted Native, black face with a red forhead which usually signifies he is a veteran of war. I darkened most of the image with speckle tools of black and then began to work in my detailed white parts in. After putting a cigerette in his mouth, I spent a while creating a realistic crying running tears effect on his left side, then continued to make traditional symbol hailstones and lightning bolts, even added one in his eye to create a more vampiric looking pupil.
White hailstones and lightning bolts were used traditionally in a lot of traditional cultural stories and artwork were used to portray evil, or evil in a physical form. I wanted to show the battle of classic good and evil I suppose in a more Indigenous style portrayal. The battle of traditional culture vs. modernism and technology.

I'll update with screenprint processes.

My Official Current Artist's 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 - the 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 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, we become (indigenous or not), 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, assimilation and colonization in technology is war.
All of us, are refugees driven from our human and indigenous state."

(ENG283-Creative Writing) Ballad Poem Assignment

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The nobodies that want to somebodies,

but not until they're dead.
Not worth the bullet that kills them,

worth more than what they said.

The people who live has gastank heads,

televisions instead of faces.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects,

empty souls in alcoholic cases.

Who are not but could be, is what I see,

Who don't have culture, but folklore.
As toxic as they make the air today,
gas masks have no use anymore.

The surest way to them is only the same,
the different is who they hate.
With work to "change" they'll never see past,
the elitest barriers they create.

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Re-worked "Terse Existence" Print; Painting idea

During my three hour flight home, I worked on the fourth print (the best in my opinion) of the "Terse Existence" prints with a very fine micron pen and at times a regualr pic pen to add in darker darks and more defining mark making. I loved also how the plate tone came out on this piece and figured it'd look better with more mixed media work put into it.

The left piece was some fooling around I did in both Gimp and Photoshop to a recent self-photo I took yesterday. I was mostly playing with color relations next to one another and mixed, as well as compositional ideas such as the 4 directions "stack". Aside from those 4 colors I loved the mixture of black, blue, green, and yellow together, and the splatter effect behind my head. Just an idea, but would be an interesting painting I think.

"Scavenger Hunt"

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Medium(s): Bic Pen

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I completed Scavenger Hunt bacially in the same amount of time as Terse Existance. I enjoy coming home some days and just sketching with pen the ideas that are in my head, and the ways I see them.
Finished in a few hours or so, my new influence in gothic style and music has really done positive things for my style as well as my ideas for the toxicating effects of assimilation.
This piece here of a woman, bending down to inspect a buffalo skull that is decorated in paint for a Sun Dance, while her newly cut hair hangs over her shoulder as she bends, holding the now discarded braid in her left hand and the scissors for doing so nearby.
All assimilation referances and the decay of Indigenous thought, morality, and overall culture can be referenced in the piece before this.

"Terse Existence"

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Medium(s): Bic Pen

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A pretty spontaneous composition I did that took about 2 1/2-3 hours using a regular black bic pen. Lately I've been combining my ideology for Indigasphyxia with some morbid and gothic elements to convey Indigenous assimilation. I entitled this "terse existence" to show that cultured life for most Native people is cut short (not so much abruptly, but chronically) as American and social radioactive temptations and mentality infect the Indigenous mind. They, in time, become diluted from these outside influences subconsciously to where it becomes all they know. Right or wrong, its what they know, what they are comfortable with, and what they can fit into with other people. I also consider this a human "stochastic matrix" almost, where regardless of what P is, it fits into the concealed and grouped matrix.
He's holding his braid he cut off to show my favorite and personal choice of direct assimilation. The syringes are a more chronic and over-time effect of assimilation, hence the "terse" aspect of it. The wires that lead from the head are a direct mind-feeding and mind-control aspect of assimilation, which is the root of it all. Assimilation is solely mental and visual. I also used these "feeding tubes" as a means of constricting the body to the chair, but not in a sense that it binds him like a prisoner. Instead of showing enslavement directly from the tubes, I feel that assimilation isn't a painful or hindering bind, but a more unnoticeable one to where it doesn't affect your movement directly, but keeps you in one place...in a chair.
The idle bottles and cans of alcohol that sit off to the side are obviously tools to help someone to lose their self-control, self-awareness, and is a social means of bonding and fitting in. I refuse to use realism on alcohol, and will always cover the containers in black with traditional white lightning bolts and hailstones; traditionally how we artistically conveyed evil when telling visual stories. Alcohol feeds assimilation. It is technically a poison as well as a mind alteration that can lead to uncontrollable behavior, loss of ones personality, and even death. It is an evil temptation, and a modern evil that will always be conveyed by me as such in the way my people always have shown it.


"Cold
Blue
Lifeless
Deathless
Illuminated by the machines
That hold you on this side
Anger or fear
So calm
Unaffected I cease to live
I fear my infection
Watching over your soul as you sleep
Injecting nightmares as you sleep
All I want is your purity
All I want in this world is your mind."