GATHER
Learn more about the work on view from the 2019 - 2022 core residency artists - Cannupa Hanska Luger + Marie Watt
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI), fabric, steel, 3 channel video loop, 2022
Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and serves as a vehicle to imagine the future on a global scale. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a continuum. Through installation and land-based work, the series develops an ongoing narrative in which Indigenous people develop sustainable, migration based technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. The project also prototypes designs for objects and their use and advances new materials and new modes of thinking within Indigenous methodologies. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, Future Ancestral Technologies conjures innovative life-based solutions for a highly adaptable lifestyle to live with the land, not off the land.
Luger’s installation reveals the relationship between Northern Plains technology and broader forms of knowledge within an Indigenous centered continuum to dream of a future that embraces solutions and survival. Centered in the installation is a Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure or TIPI, accompanied by a 3 channel video depicting a family traversing the detritus of a civilization long reclaimed by nature. Translucent fabric of the TIPI skin creates a screen for light based moving imagery which maps the family's story from the perspective of a child. We are invited to witness a world which has always been and simultaneously is in the process of becoming; to witness a future dream space which is not ours to inhabit, but rather asks us to pay attention to our own relationship to place.Through this science fiction motivated installation, Luger challenges our collective thinking to imagine a post-capitalist, post-colonial future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other, and the artist asks us to consider how we will dream of our collective future.
“Future Ancestral Technologies looks to customs in order to move us forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking by utilizing science fiction theory, creative storytelling, Indigenous technology and contemporary materials to present future landscapes of care and harmony. ” -Cannupa Hanska Luger
More about the video work:
The 3 channel video work presented is the culmination of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s 2021 visiting artist residency at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) where the artist filmed and worked on post-production and installation design for this new multi-channel moving image work. Cannupa Hanska Luger was in residence with his wife Ginger Dunnill and their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa. Part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, this project incorporates artist-made regalia, props, videos, and performance, dreaming alternative possible futures for sites of post-industrial extraction, reimaging them anew through speculative oral histories for the future. The residence project with EMPAC was curated by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley, recent graduates from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
More about the TIPI:
Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure or TIPI is an ongoing installation theme for artist Cannupa Hanska Luger relating to notions of migration, care and home. The visual language relates to the artist's ancestral shelter form of the Northern Plains, yet is presented in various interpretations to communicate the ever present notion of continuum in culture. The TIP presented for this installation fabricated by Portland Garment Factory.
Learn more about Cannupa’s art on his website.
Marie Watt
Vivid Dream (Awakening) , Tin jingles, cotton twill tape, polyester mesh, steel, 2022
Vivid Dream (Awakening) is in many ways a prototype and test. It is a project I’ve been wanting, dreaming, to realize for some time. Gather is the perfect venue for its debut. The piece itself is the result of gathered stories, gathered tin jingles, and of gathered relationships—the Portland Garment Factory who helped with the fabrication of Each/Other and Vivid Dream, my studio team that I affectionately refer to as the Braintrust, ShirLy Grisanti and the communities at Stelo and Camp Colton, and Cannupa Hanska Luger and his family. I am interested in the reverberations — sounds, stories, actions and relationships— that are active agents and bi-products of gathering.
Historically, jingles were created from the rolled tops of tobacco cans and other tin lids. They are grounded in Indigenous histories of making and storytelling, adornment and ritual. Here they hover between the sky and the earth. Simultaneously heavy and weightless, the jingles nudge and tap each other, creating murmurs of sound when animated by a breeze. They amplify each other’s stories, reverberating with each passing movement.
The tin jingles in this piece acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1900s during the influenza pandemic. The idea for the dance came to a tribal elder in a dream. When it was performed, according to the vision, the young girl who was sick, in time, became well. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act. In 1883, the United States banned Indigenous ceremonial gatherings. Though the ban was repealed in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, during its century-long prohibition the Jingle Dress Dance was shared with other tribal communities. Today it is a pow-wow dance and continues to be associated with healing. The relevance of this dance extends beyond pandemics.
The jingle cloud-like forms recall a story, Lifting the Sky, that I heard as a child, told by Vi Hilbert from the Upper Skagit of the greater Coast Salish tribe. As the story goes…the sky was starting to press down on the people. Overwhelming the world with darkness, it became incumbent on the people — who spoke different languages and didn’t necessarily understand one another — to find a common vocabulary, even just one phrase, that would allow them to work together. The word they found is yəhaw̓ which means to proceed, to go forward, to do. Working together using sticks and saying that one word, yəhaw̓, with group effort they push up the sky. These clouds are lifted together, hoisted by many hands just as they were created by many hands. They are first steps in a rhythm of healing and gathering, of being and hearing together.
Learn more about Marie’s art on her website.