Bard MFA Thesis Statement

We are
now together
on this journey.
You and I
have always been together on this journey.
We.

American dominion pervades; American dominion provokes retribution.
Our installation is cyclical as and is a metaphor of our American history. We are confronted with a vomitous eruption of shape, form, and imagery. The installation is not easily consumable. The ideas and propositions in the work are not easily consumable.

 A cacophony of beer bottles dominate the room. The beer bottle is a mass produced commodity and symbol of western culture and capitalism. The bottles don an American flag bottle cap. Patriots only drink patriotic beer. Is it unpatriotic to fly an American flag beer bottle cap upside down? Is it unpatriotic to discard the visage of the sacred cloth in a garbage can once we’ve popped the cap? The line of sacrilege is always moving to suit contemporary values. The beer bottles are a physical manifestation of the oppression the artist and his Lakota people face on the great plains of South Dakota. The oppression is brutal, overwhelming, and unrelenting.

A thrown beer bottle
will bruise.
A broken beer bottle
will cut.
An open beer bottle,
when the contents are consumed,
can numb a broken heart.
A beer bottle can poison a liver
until it no longer works.
Until cirrhosis sets in
and the heart bleeds
to death,
before its time.

The beer bottles are poured from trash cans; falling and frozen in motion; a proto cinema. Every moment of their descent and destruction is captured and presented all at once. Time becomes irreverent. Lines of machine wire trace the movement of each bottle. An action drawing is created by these lines.  Everything is fine and art and nothing is fine nor is it artOur artist does not use traditional fine art materials or archival processes. Instead, deploying found and readymade objects, non-art materials, to transcend the market expectations of what he should be creating. A thirst exists in American culture for romantic narratives of bygone Indians, on horseback, in head dresses, on the plains, gone. This romantic narrative is a tool for erasure that our artist is highly aware of and fights against in all of his work. There is no buying, selling, shipping, insuring, or archiving our installation. There is no romance here.

 The floor is covered with silhouettes of buffalo ghosts that radiate from the center of the room. They represent the millions of dead Buffalo who were killed during western expansion by U.S. settlers and their greed. The buffalo were the primary economy of the Lakota people providing food, shelter, tools, and spiritual guidance. The artist’s Lakota ancestors’ relationship with the buffalo was both one of consumption and supplication. The buffalo were hunted nearly to extinction by western forces in hopes of crippling the Lakota people and stripping them of their freedom, lives, and land. The settlers often times only took the tongues from the carcasses leaving millions of pounds of life sustaining meat and spiritual meaning to rot. These massacres were surrealist experiences for those Lakota ancestors who used every single part of the sacred and venerated buffalo. The artist’s ancestors’ perception of reality was broken in these moments and would continue to break until their way of life was stripped from them never to be the same again. The artist and his people still mourn the loss of the Great Buffalo herds along with their reality that was broken and mutilated on those fields with those beautiful, sacred, animals.

The buffalo ghosts rise from the floor up the wall, up, up into the rafters and into the heavens. The ghosts are our conscience. The little devils and angels sitting upon our shoulders praising or rebuking our actions. These ghosts exist in every part of America. The imagery acts as both light and dark idiomata  . They are a metaphor of a parable that we knew but have now forgotten. Our artist will try to jog our memory. The buffalo ghosts are represented as wholesome caricatures inspired from by Sunday comics. The cartoon buffalo ghosts are distorted through surface treatments of fire and violence. We should feel discomfort confronting this violence, our violence, but this layer of meaning hasn’t reached our internal monologue yet. There is a mutation that occurs within the repeated Buffalo forms. One set of horns turns into two.   Letterforms creep into our purview.   Our  artist’s Lakota heritage respects metamorphosis both figuratively and literally; it has to or it would not have survived genocide. We see both the positive and negative   silhouettes of the buffalo within the paper assemblage. Aggressive lines of barbed wire protrude from the wall violently reaching for the assemblage and for us. We are careful not to be caught by the installation ; we are careful not to be caught by our own history; we are careful not to be caught by our ownemotions. It is not our fault.

The visage of Americana is perverted through our installation. How we reveled in our freedom and our sacrilegecheap patriotism. The stories we tell about American history are filtered through the memories and propaganda of the victor and oppressor. I often ask theCan those uninitiated   to indigenous histories to imagine  that the Nazis had won World War II and we we are now living in the aftermath of that victory? How would we talk about the Holocaust? How would we talk about Nazi conquest and their war crimes? How would you we feel saluting a Nazi flag at a football game? Our installation unflinchingly explores the American historical narrative through in this way. A historical narrative that is written and edited by the colonizer and oppressor, and we must try to see it through our artist’s eyes. There will be no quarter given here.

The deluge of beer bottles crash us back down to earth, back down to reality. In the center, the bottles part, and there is a child, untouched, safe. On the floor, a medicine wheel is visible; it is a symbol of Lakota faith and culture which are intertwined. The child is protected from the violent storm by the symbol of their faith and culture. It is a simple statement but one grounded in deep truth.

The child is the artist’s mother
who found shelter
from the storm
through her traditional faith
and raised the artist
the best she could
even though the oppression
stacked upon her
was unsurmountable.

The child is a prayer
made for the artist’s children
made for future Lakota children
who must face a broken reality
fraught with unsurmountable oppression
A prayer to survive
and remake their reality
for themselves
their community
and you and I.