Our Land Your Imagination: The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific Worldview and Phoenix is featured in the exhibition Outsiders Within: Contemporary Work from Regional Latino/a and Native American Artists at the Tempe Center for the Arts. The exhibition is on display April 25 - July 3, 2009.
Our Land Your Imagination: The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific Worldview and Phoenix, 2008
Two-channel video installation, with sound. Running time: 12:32.
Our Land Your Imagination is a series of multi-channel video installations that examine the impact of the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View on the landscapes of America and the Western Hemisphere. The series of work is comprised of reappropriated and re-contextualized Youtube videos submitted by users who live within the particular community or region featured in the installation. My goal is to create site-specific video installations that reveal the complexity of interactions between the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View and Indigenous land. I want to create environments where audiences are engaged by multiple narratives of moving images, voices, music and sounds that tell a story about a story of which we are all participants.
“The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View and Phoenix” is a two channel video installation comprised of 10 Youtube videos. Each channel contains five looped videos projected onto cornering walls. One of the channels features anonymous women singing karaoke versions of Carpenters songs about love and loss, hope and failure, and dreams unrealized. They are the muses and voices of the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View. The singers are juxtaposed against videos of suburban Phoenix: a construction site near a dairy farm in south Chandler; an empty house for sale in Buckeye resulting from foreclosure; a hot air balloon crashing down on an Anthem subdivision; a dust storm viewed from within the cinder block walls of a tract house property in Maricopa; and a set of palm trees in a Mesa backyard blowing in the wind — entirely non-Indigenous and ubiquitous. Audiences are confronted with internal and external landscapes altered by the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View. The installation provides an unfiltered vision of damaged, monotonous, lonely, and tragically beautiful visions of suburban Phoenix through the surprisingly intimate and revealing lens of the Phoenix suburban community itself.
The Way the Sun Rises Over Rivers Is No Different Than the Way the Sun Sets Over Oceans is currently featured in the exhibition Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The exhibition is on display through August 23, 2009.
A collaborative exhibition created by the Heard Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Remix seeks to explore complex ideas about what it means to be an indigenous artist in the 21st century. The exhibition, featuring the work of 15 artists from across the western hemisphere, explores the very limits of human experience. Remix was organized by the Heard Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Co-curated by Gerald McMaster & Joe Baker.
The Way the Sun Rises Over Rivers Is No Different Than the Way the Sun Sets Over Oceans, 2007
Video and mixed-media installation (three channel video, text, sound, artificial burning log). Running time: 5 min. Top photo: Installation view, text in Cherokee syllabary. Image courtesy of the artist. Bottom photo: Installation view, text in English. Image courtesy of the artist.
Suburban Bush is from a series of two-dimensional work titled Semiotic Warfare. The series utilizes short, stark, poignant and ironic phrases written in Cherokee syllabary, and a variety of media, to examine postcolonial signifiers that define contemporary geographies, economic markets, political bodies and intercultural intercourse throughout North America. In this work the Cherokee syllabary becomes a transformative medium of Cherokee propagation and cultural/political self-determination. By engaging the viewer, the architecture of a particular space and the broader contexts of a particularized regional geography the work becomes a semiotic vehicle of hemispherical decolonization — physically, politically and cognitively.
Semiotic Warfare: Suburban Bush, 2008
Mixed media (video with sound, automobile paint and acrylic mirror on wood panels), 46″ x 12″. Featured in the exhibition Chaos Theory 9 at Legend City Studios, Phoenix, Arizona. Image courtesy of Jason Grubb, Legend City Studios.
Our Land Your Imagination is a series of multi-channel video installations that examine the impact of the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View on the suburban landscapes of America and the Western Hemisphere. The series of work is comprised of reappropriated Youtube videos submitted by users who live within the particular community or region featured in the installation. The videos featured here are in the Phoenix installation, Don’t Turn It Off, There’s Enough Water For Your Dreams.
