in the cultural conversation. It is my hope that these Native American photographs will represent an intervention within the contentious and competing visual languages that form today’s photographic canon.” 11
Cross Currents artists also explore trans-customary technique and practice in order to organize and create works that make reference to indigenous technologies while engaging the beauty and difficulty of present day Indian circumstance. Sarah Ortegon’s work operates at the interstices of customary practice--in the form of complex stitch beadwork, substance abuse awareness and prevention, and the recuperative power of art to transform reality. Her, On the Mend, 2013, uses artistic practice to imagine and implement a reversal of the loss of, “Once meaningful practices...being replaced by the use of mind numbing substances, which is off-setting the balance of the communities on the reservation.”12 Beadwork is a labor-intensive practice, which requires a commitment that can lead to focused contemplation and healing. Through the process of beading her found “shooter” bottles of alcohol, Ortegon is capturing them as her own, displacing the damage they have done and opening a space for recuperation. Wendy Red Star’s star quilts combine real Crow “rez” colors and patterns with photographic images sourced from her father’s extensive personal archive. In mining her father’s Ektachrome museum of 1970s Crow life and embedding the images into customary forms Red Star is, “mediating our experience of Crow people in the twenty-first century
by honoring her home with a healthy sense of humor,” and in so doing, “She checks our expectations to explain the equivalences of life then and now.” 13 Red Star’s vibrant work makes the case that traditional art forms have always been about innovation. Her photographic star quilts represent contemporary, trans-customary, cultural production created from an affirmative position of survivance by a contemporary Crow woman. Within the competing logics of artistic inspiration and the politics of representation this is one framework from which the artists exhibiting in Cross Currents create counter-narratives that engage, challenge and play within a field of cultural signifiers of Native America.
- Will Wilson, Santa Fe, 2013 6 Sherry Farrell Racette, “Encoded Knowledge: Memory and Objects in Con-
temporary Native American Art,” in Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, ed. Nancy M. Mithlo (Santa Fe: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011), 40
7 Marie Watt, “Artist Statement,” http://mkwatt.com/index.php/content/work_ detail/category/blanket_stories_samplers/ 8
Sarah Sense, “Weaving Water project statement,” 2013.
9 Jolene Rickard, “Skin Seven Spans Thick,” in Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor, ed. Kathleen Ash-Milby (Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian), 94. 10
Cannupahanska Luger, “extended title,” http://cannupahanska.com/art. php?projects=archive 11
Will Wilson, “Artist Statement, CIPX,” http://willwilson.photoshelter. com/#!/about 12 Sarah Ortegon, Artist statement, 2013. 13 Polly Nordstrand, “Beauty and the Blow-up Beast,” in Art Quantum: the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 2009, eds. James H. Nottage with Jennifer Complo McNutt and Ashley Holland, (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 92.
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