Artist Statement~as of 1/18/2013

This work navigates through “split-headedness,” which comes from being raised within an indigenous/tribal paradigm as well as having education in linear, Western concepts and society. This journey continues by sifting indigenous identity through a colonized being searching to decolonize, discovering ways to bridge understanding of what it is to exist in a state of two conflicting paradigms. The aim is for this work to reverberate the current spirit of resilience and healing within my community with expressive mark making and vibrant colors. This exploration allows reclaiming misconceptions about how indigenous identity is depicted. My studio practice of painting and research leads to experimentation with indigenous symbols, depictions, and philosophy, creating an artistic space for these expressions to exist within the art-historically loaded realm of Western (a tradition of European and Modernist American) painting. Creating scarred, layered surfaces with palette knife painting and scraping, bringing forth emerging and disappearing figures with squeegees, I create emotive landscapes that bridge between literal and abstract, searching for where my identity belongs. Following an oil-paint bar line transverse ancestral maps leads one through these plains of generational trauma, nostalgia, histories and stories. By using a Euro-centric historically packed medium, oil painting, the dichotomy of understanding contemporary indigenous people hoods struggle to relate, connect, and live in a society created to destroy them is ambiguously revealed. By excavating complicated and ugly psychological depths, beauty is unveiled through re-creation, using marks that manifest qualities of present and lost ceremonies, bodies, language, song, and homelands.