The Art Show 2023

Catharine Clark Gallery at The Art Show November 1 – 5, 2023 | Booth A12 Works by Stephanie Syjuco and Marie Watt

For its inaugural presentation at The Art Show, Catharine Clark Gallery presents Double Vision: Rethinking Manifest Destiny, a dual artist presentation of work

by Stephanie Syjuco and Marie Watt. As women of color raised in the American West, Syjuco and Watt draw on frontier histories and mythologies of manifest destiny to imagine narratives that critique and explode tropes of White American exceptionalism. Syjuco’s work pulls at the seams of the archive, revealing how institutions function both as repositories of exclusionary histories and as sites of erasure. By comparison, Watt’s poetic sculptures, often incorporating blankets and textiles, draw on Seneca and Indigenous practices of exchange to invite us to consider communal space in a deeper way.

Cover image: Marie Watt, Skywalker/Skyscraper (Forest), 2021. Installation image, detail. Photograph

by Kevin McConnell. Opposite page: Installation images of Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX.

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Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Philippines; lives in Oakland, California) works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Her projects leverage opensource systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. in 2019-20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century.

Born in the Philippines, her family emigrated to the United States when she was a child.

Syjuco received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Stanford University. Her work has been widely exhibited and has been the subject of several solo museum presentations, including: Stephanie Syjuco: Blind Spot at the MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan (catalogue); Stephanie Syjuco: White Balance/Color Cast, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Stephanie Syjuco: Image Trafficking, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Stephanie Syjuco: The Visible Invisible, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; and Vanishing Point (Overlay), Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland.

Syjuco’s work is featured in Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, October 20, 2023 – April 7, 2024.

In January 2024, her work is included in the exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother opening January 11, 2024, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In June 2024 Syjuco will open a solo museum exhibition with a catalogue at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. In Spring 2024, Radius Books will publish Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive, an artist book conceptualized by Syjuco. Catharine Clark Gallery will present a solo survey exhibition with Syjuco, which will encompass the entire gallery, on view March 9 – May 4, 2024.

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Her work has been collected by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Saint Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, among others.

A long-time educator, Syjuco is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked with Silverlens Gallery since 2023, exhibited with RYAN LEE Gallery since 2013, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2008.

Orange Alert (Fluorescent Orange on White Tulips) in the series “Hard Light”, 2019 Pigmented inkjet print. Edition of 5 + 2AP. Sheet: 24 x 30 inches; Frame: 25 x 31 inches. $12,000 framed. Prices are subject to change based on edition.

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Double Vision,” 2022 Stephanie Syjuco’s installation “Double Vision,” originally commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum, reconstituted the Western landscape as seen in canvases by the 19th century painters (particularly Charles Russell and Frederic Remington) largely responsible for crafting a perception of the West as a site of open, lustrous expanse.

Syjuco took that context as her starting point and created a vibrant, immersive environment inspired by paintings from the Amon Carter Museum’s collection along with large-scale photographs of bronze sculptures by Frederic Remington from this same era. The photographs include details of the art preparators’ gloves and tools, and collectively speak to the image-making of the institution. The West, Syjuco seems to argue, was invented not only by the artists but also by the structures and systems of the museums that commission, conserve, and collect their work.” – Excerpt from catalogue essay for Cowboy, eds. Miranda Lash and Nora Abrams. Rizzoli: 2023. Pg. 27.

Syjuco’s installation “Double Vision” is on view in Cowboy at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO | September 29, 2023 – February 18, 2024 6

Image: Installation of Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision at The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, 2022.

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Set-up (The Outlaw), 2021 All photographs: Framed pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta.

Editions of 3 + 1AP. Sheets: 48 x 34 inches; Frames: 48 1/16 x 34 1/16 inches. $15,000. Prices are subject to change based on edition.

Also available in 72 x 52 inches. POR

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Set Up (The Rattlesnake), 2021

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Set-up (The Broncho Buster 1), 2021

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Set-up (The Broncho Buster 2), 2021

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Afterimages,” 2021 “Afterimages” expands on Stephanie Syjuco’s research into the problematic construction of American history and concurrent histories of photography that inform deeply biased structures foregrounding whiteness as a normative subject.

These works resulted from Syjuco’s Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in which the artist spent hundreds of hours embedded in the archives of the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of Anthropology in Washington, D.C. searching for visual evidence of the Philippines and Filipinos in the official American archive.

“Afterimages” is a suite of five photogravures on gampi paper. The images are reproduced and manipulated photographs that were originally cartes de visites for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Syjuco crumples these photos, concealing the identity of the individual, thus protecting them from the viewer’s gaze.

Afterimages (Interference of Vision), 2021 12

Afterimages (Deflection of Vision), 2021 On view in the exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother opening January 11, 2024, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Only available in suite of five photogravures: $35,000 unframed.

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Afterimages (Field of Vision), 2021

Afterimages (Obstruction of Vision), 2021 14

Afterimages (Interruption of Vision), 2021 All artworks: Photogravures printed on gampi and mounted on Somerset black 280 gram cotton rag. Re-edited photographs of an ethnological display of Filipinos from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Printed by Paul Mullowney and Harry Schneider in editions of 20 + 8 proofs. Co-published by BOXBLUR, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Mullowney Printing, San Francisco, CA and Portland, OR. Images: 20 x 16 or 16 x 20 inches; Sheets: 24 x 18 or 18 x 24 inches.

Note: Crumpled/folded gampi is proud by 1/8 inches from back mounted layer of Somerset.

Individual photogravures: $6,000. Framing is POR.

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Stephanie Syjuco | Fixed Focus (Dead Center), 2021 Fixed Focus presents 36 photos mounted in a grid, displaying excerpts from the archival files of Dean Conant Worcester, an early American ethnographic explorer and staunch supporter of American imperialism in the Philippines. At the exact center of each image is a notated correction, evidence of a factual error or typed mistake recorded into the archive. Blown up so that the surrounding text is only legible via snippets, the errors themselves become the central focus, as opposed to the anthropological “findings” that served to support white superiority and early notions of eugenics. By showing these texts as fallible and correctable, Syjuco hints at the possibility for a counter-narrative to also be applied to the form of the archive. Each image is printed at the standard size of a sheet of paper to further reference the official form of institutional documents and records.

Fixed Focus (Dead Center), 2021 Opposite page: full installation image by John Janca.

36 pigmented inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Baryta mounted on 2mm E-Panel.

Edition of 3 + 2AP. 71 x 56 inches overall. 11 x 8 1/2 inches each. Edition 2/3: $28,000.

Prices are subject to change based on edition. Above: detail.

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Applicant Photos (Migrants),” 2017 “Applicant Photos (Migrants)” (2017) is a series of three photographs printed at the scale of passport photos. Syjuco developed this body of work at the same time as “Cargo Cults” (2016), her now-iconic series of photographs in which she purchased clothes printed with geometric black-and-white patterns – which were often marketed as “exotic” or “tribal” print – from stores like H&M and Forever21 and restyled them to create fabricated “characters” that referenced racist tropes that are common in ethnographic photographs.

Applicant Photos (Migrants) #1, 2017

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“Applicant Photos (Migrants)”, however, was realized in direct response to the 2017 immigration ban on Muslims seeking asylum in the United States. Syjuco again uses these patterned garments from fast fashion chain stores. Sitting in as her own model, she fully obscures her face, thwarting the viewer’s attempts to “read” her identity. This serves a dual purpose: to elude identification and remain anonymous in an era of surveillance and tracking, and to also reference the many ways that migrants and refugees have been depicted as a faceless, anonymous mass.

Applicant Photos (Migrants) #2, 2017

Applicant Photos (Migrants) #3, 2017 All photographs: Pigmented inkjet prints. Editions of 10 + 2AP; 2/10.

Sheets: 3 3/5 x 4 1/5 inches; Frames: 20 x 16 inches.

Full suite of three photographs: $20,000.

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Block Out the Sun,” 2019 – 2022 Institutional repositories, archives, and museums are tasked with housing cultural collections, framing historical narratives, and creating research opportunities for future generations. These archives are also rife with omission, racial bias, and a subjective eye toward what should be collected and preserved for posterity. How does one “talk back” to an archive and attempt to potentially re-narrate its documents and images?

In conjunction with Syjuco’s 2019 solo exhibition Rogue States, at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, the artist researched images in local archives, libraries, and historical societies, searching for photographic documentation of a faux Filipino village created for the 1904 World’s Fair. A newly-acquired colony of the United States, The Philippines (and Filipino culture) was showcased for the American public via a living “human zoo,” filled with 1,200 imported “natives” performing dances and rituals. These displays served dual purposes: as entertainment and as ethnographic pedagogical tool for justifying racial hierarchy and white supremacy. After seeing image after image of this spectacle, it struck Syjuco that the photos, while historical, also serve to constantly reinscribe and reify the power dynamics of the time. Although factual (this “happened”), the constant effect of viewing these staged ethnographic images could also serve to perpetuate racist stereotypes, despite attempts to frame them as outdated or a relic of their time. These images, unfortunately, still speak for a culture.

By physically blocking the images with her hands, Syjuco attempted a direct way of intervening with an archive, and thwarting the viewer’s ability to fully consume the people and faces on display. Over a century after the original photos of the Filipino Village were taken, her own body, sitting in the archives, becomes both a temporary shield and a marker of defiance, while at the same time acknowledging that the images still remain.

On view in the exhibition Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility October 20, 2023 – April 7, 2024 at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. All photographs: Pigmented inkjet prints. Editions of 8 + 2AP. $8,000 framed.

Prices are subject to change based on edition.

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Block Out the Sun (Shadow), 2022 Sheet: 20 x 16 inches.

Frame: 21 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches.

Block Out the Sun (Shield), 2022 Sheet: 16 x 29 inches.

Frame: 17 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches.

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Neutral Orchids,” 2016 “Neutral Orchids” (2016) presents images of living orchids that have been sprayed with industrial gray primer paint and were then shot against a photographic neutral gray, seamless background. Syjuco considers the orchid’s status as an “exotic” product that has become commodified and sold around the world. By physically neutralizing them with paint, they become “blank” signifiers for cultural projections of otherness. The paint eventually kills them, but in the process, new blooms begin to emerge as the plant fights for survival in an act of resistance that mirrors the struggle of colonized people against colonial powers.

All photographs: Pigmented inkjet prints. Editions of 10 + 2AP. Current pricing is POR. Prices are subject to change based on edition.

Neutral Orchids (Phalaenopsis + Dracaena sanderana), 2016 AP2/2. Sheet: 32 x 24 inches.

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Neutral Orchids (Phalaenopsis + Dracaena sanderana 2), 2016 Edition 3/10. Sheet: 32 x 24 inches.

Neutral Orchids (Cluster 1), 2016

Neutral Orchids (Dendrobium), 2016

Neutral Orchids (Phalaenopsis, mort), 2016

Neutral Orchids (Phalaenopsis, small), 2016

Edition 5/10. Sheet: 34 x 25 1/2 inches.

Edition 3/10. Sheet: 19 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches.

Edition 4/10. Sheet: 24 x 18 inches.

Edition 8/10. Sheet: 20 x 15 inches.

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Hard Light,” 2019 “Hard Light” furthers Stephanie Syjuco’s investigation of how we relate to histories of colonialism and power throughout a coded language of “color.” In this series, Syjuco spray paints white oriental lilies and white tulips – species of plants indigenous to countries in Asia that were subsequently cultivated through colonial trade – with Krylon aerosol paint. While vibrant and formally arresting, Syjuco’s images also invite a more trenchant investigation of how we codify otherness, and how color bears a literally and proverbial weight upon our collective consciousness. Placed in the context of contemporary American politics, “Hard Light” is also a meditation on how identities are being edited, amplified, erased, and even whitewashed.

All photographs: Pigmented inkjet prints. Editions of 5 + 2AP. Sheets: 30 x 24 inches; Frames: 31 x 25 inches. $12,000 framed.

Prices are subject to change based on edition.

Whiteout (Krylon ColorMaster Gloss White on White Oriental Lilies) in the series “Hard Light”, 2019 24

Blackout (Krylon ColorMaster Gloss Black on White Oriental Lilies Sprayed Gloss White) in the series “Hard Light”, 2019

Stephanie Syjuco | To the Person Sitting in Darkness, 2019 To the Person Sitting in Darkness is part of Syjuco’s ongoing investigation into the power and meaning of flags and banners. A country’s flag supports ideas of nationhood and national identity, and often symbolizes a country’s claim over territory.

The flag was originally installed in the courtyard of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and takes its design from the words of Mark Twain. Twain condemned all efforts

by Western nations to lay claim to the non-Western world. In a 1901 essay for the North American Review, reprinted as a pamphlet by the Anti-Imperialist League, Twain said, “And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one—our states do it: We can just have our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.” Twain’s flag was never produced. Syjuco creates the flag as it was designed and published in the North American Review, her version is rendered oversized yet limp and powerless.

To the Person Sitting in Darkness, 2019 Digital dye-sublimation print on fabric. Edition of 3 + 2AP. Dimensions variable as installed.

Approximately 68 x 118 inches. $10,000. Prices are subject to change based on edition.

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Stephanie Syjuco | Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019 Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) collapses images and objects referencing American colonialist expansion in the Philippines during the early 1900s, as well as contemporary racial politics and historical amnesia. Archival research of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair collides with contemporary protest imagery, political references, and textiles. Chroma key green, traditionally deployed in digital video post-production, is used in intricate handsewn garments, backdrops, and props, including a reproduction of 19th century American dress, MAGA hats, tiki torches, and artificial houseplants. The allusion to postproduction and image manipulation is a direct reference to the construction of an American narrative that is itself a problematic construction.

Images and objects include: stolen stock photographs of tropical fruit and durian (a type of fruit), Philippine antiquities harvested from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online database, balaclava masks from Amazon.com, ethnographic photography and stereocards, plant specimens from the University of California’s Jepson Herbarium, cosmetic skintone charts, photographic color calibration and “Shirley” cards, Filipinx weaving patterns, 19th century American overshot coverlet weavings found on eBay, a floating head with long hair, a pale gray handsewn American flag, a traditional 19th century Filipinx “terno” dress sewn from digitally printed fabric, lasercut silhouettes of tropical houseplants, vintage studio portrait photographs, American anthropologist Albert Kroeber and Ishi the so-called “last of the Yahi Indians”, early op-art drawing

by Ruth Asawa, Japanese American women making camouflage netting in a WWII internment camp, poop emojis, fist emojis, flame emojis, inverted color calibration charts, printer’s crop marks, Philippine revolutionaries (“Illustrados”), Photoshop transparency grids, rocks, and bricks, among many other objects and source materials.

Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019 Wooden platform, digital photos and printed vinyl on lasercut wood, chromakey fabric, printed backdrops, seamless paper, artificial plants, mixed media.

Overall: 240 x 204 x 96 inches. Edition of 3 + 2AP. POR. Prices are subject to change based on edition.

Opposite: Installation of Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage) from Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, MO, 2019. Installation images by Dusty Kessler.

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Stephanie Syjuco | “Native Resolution,” 2021 “Native Resolution” expands on Syjuco’s research into the problematic construction of American history and concurrent histories of photography that inform deeply biased structures foregrounding whiteness as a normative subject. Borrowing from the visual language of photography, anthropology, and museum archives, “Native Resolution” examines how these disciplines go hand-in-hand with producing and proliferating images and documents of exclusion, generating a skewed collection that mirrors an American imagination built on ethnographic record and cultural “othering.”

In technological terms, “native resolution” refers to the inherent amount of information in a digital image, a terminology that Syjuco also employs to consider how the American record, when looking outside of itself, is inherently a low-resolution, incomplete endeavor. At turns deflecting the viewer’s gaze or redirecting it onto the act of viewing itself, the works in this series question the ability of the archive and photography itself to be neutral cultural narrators. By extension, Syjuco re-photographs national archives and institutional records as a means of examining how photography and imaging technologies created permanent historical value through flawed forms of knowledge.

Pileup (Brass Bells), 2021 28

On view in the exhibition New Sun-Worshippers: Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, February 18 – April 30, 2024, at The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. All photographs in the series “Pileups:” Hand-assembled pigmented inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Baryta.

Sheets: 48 x 36 or 36 x 48 inches.

Frames: 48 5/8 x 36 5/8 or 36 5/8 x 48 5/8 inches.

Editions of 3 + 2AP. Edition 2: $26,000.

Edition 3: $30,000.

Prices are subject to change based on edition.

Pileup (Eastman), 2021

Pileup (Herbaria), 2021 29

Stephanie Syjuco | “Cargo Cults,” 2013 – 2023 Stephanie Syjuco’s “Cargo Cults” series revisits historical ethnographic studio portraiture via fictional display: using mass-manufactured goods purchased from American shopping malls and restyled to highlight popular fantasies associated with “ethnic” patterning and costume. Purchased on credit cards and returned for full refund after the photo shoots, the cheap garments hail from the distant lands of Forever21, H&M, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Target, The Gap, and more.

Pulling from earlier projects reworking “dazzle camouflage” – a WWI technique of painting battleships with graphic black and white patterns in order to confuse enemy aim – the disruptive outlines shift the viewer’s attention from foreground to background in an attempt to “find” the false subject. Black and white calibration charts encroach upon the pictures, and in some cases overlap and cover portions of the figure, as if insisting on their ability to “correct” the situation.

All photographs: Pigmented inkjet prints. Framing is POR. Prices are subject to change based on edition.

Top left: Cargo Cults: Head Bundle, 2016 Top right: Cargo Cults: Java Bunny, 2016 Bottom right: Cargo Cults: Basket Woman, 2016 Editions of 15 + 2AP. Sheet: 20 x 15 inches.

Edition 10/15 – 14/15: $7,500. Edition 15/15: $9,500.

Bottom left: Cargo Cults (Set-Up), 2013/2023.

Edition of 15 + 3AP. $12,500. Sheet: 30 x 20 inches.

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Overlay, 2021

Pigmented inkjet print on Hahnemühle Baryta. Edition of 3 + 2AP. Sheet: 33 x 26 inches; Frame: 34 x 27 inches.

Edition 3/3: $22,000.

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Crumpled Calibration 1, 2021

Archival pigment inkjet. Edition of 5 + 2AP. Sheet: 15 x 20 inches; Frame: 17 x 21 inches. $7,500.

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Marie Watt (b. 1967, Seattle, Washington) is an American artist whose interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, and Iroquois proto-feminism. Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University, Connecticut, as well as degrees from Willamette University, Oregon, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, New Mexico. In 2016, Watt was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University, Oregon. Watt serves on the board for VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art), New York, and on the Native Advisory Committee at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, of which she is a member of the Board of Trustees.

Catharine Clark Gallery presented Watt’s solo exhibition Marie Watt: Companion Species (Calling Back, Calling Forward) in 2022. In 2023, Watt’s work was exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas. Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt (on view February 4, 2022 – October 20, 2024), a traveling monographic survey exhibition drawn from the collection of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation and accompanied by a catalogue, continues to be exhibited at six total institutions in the U.S. Watt’s work is included in the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College through November 26, 2023. In 2023, her work was also featured in Converge45 in Portland, OR and in The Land Carries Our Ancestors at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Catharine Clark Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Watt’s work, September 21 – November 16, 2024.

Watt’s work is held in many public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, California; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Forge Project, Taghkanic, New York; Gochman Family Collection, New York, New York; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C.; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Tacoma Art Museum, Washington; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others.

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Watt recently exhibited at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of WisconsinMadison; The Mackenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, Canada; Stelo Arts, Oregon; The Buffalo History Museum, New York, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Marie Watt lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She has exhibited with PDX Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; Marc Straus, New York, New York; and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, Illinois. She has exhibited with Catharine Clark Gallery since 2019 and has been represented by the gallery since 2022.

Cradle, 2011 – 2022

Cast bronze, fabricated at Walla Walla Foundry, Washington.

Edition variee of 6.

15 x 15 1/2 x 7 inches.

Edition 5/6: Please allow 6 months for production.

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Marie Watt | “Skywalker/Skyscraper (Forest),” 2021 Marie Watt notes that blankets “are everyday objects that can carry extraordinary histories of use.” In Indigenous communities, such as the Seneca Nation (of which Watt is a member), “blankets are given away to honor those who are witness to important life events.” “Skywalker/ Skyscraper”, by extension, was inspired by Watt’s move to Brooklyn, and her discovery that the border of Cobble Hill and Gowanus (the locations of her home and studio, respectively) was where Iroquois ironworkers and their families settled in the 1950s, when most of Manhattan’s skyscrapers were being built. Watt remarks that “these Iroquois were called ‘skywalkers’ because they worked on the high steel without safety harnesses.”

Above and opposite: Skywalker/Skyscraper (Forest), 2021

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Marie Watt | Calling Back, Calling Forward, 2021 Marie Watt writes that “I probably heard Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ for the first time when I was around five years old, listening to AM radio while being driven through the suburbs of Seattle in my parents’ kelly-green Datsun station wagon. This would have been 1972 or ’73. I’d like to give my five-year-old self credit for liking the groove of the music, but that would be generous. I don’t know that the song meant anything to me at the time, but looking back, it should have.”

Watt continues, “I grew up in an interracial family. My mom, a member of the Seneca Nation, was raised on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York. My father is white, of German-Scottish descent; he was raised on homesteaded land in Wyoming and comes from a family of ranchers and itinerant educators. They met in Seattle, where I was born. Because membership in our tribe is traced matrilineally, I am a citizen of the Seneca Nation like my mom. We also call ourselves the Haudenosaunee, or ‘people of the longhouse.’ Some people may be more familiar with the name the French gave us: the Iroquois Confederacy.”

The lyrics to “What’s Going On” were originally written by Obie Benson, who happened to be on a bus that passed by People’s Park in Berkeley on a day in 1969 when three thousand people had gathered there to protest the Vietnam War. Benson’s question was framed not only by the protest that was taking place outside the window of the bus, but also by the civil rights movement, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz, which began in 1969 and would last until 1971. The Alcatraz occupation was an effort to generate awareness of the ingrained poverty, inadequate infrastructure, pervasive unemployment, frail cultural fabric, and rampant alcoholism that plagued Native reservations as a result of the failure of federal and state governments to follow through on their treaty obligations with Indigenous nations.

“Almost five decades later,” Watt comments, “I am streaming this song and listening to it with deep attention. In it I hear what I interpret as an intersection between Marvin Gaye’s knowledge and traditional Haudenosaunee/Indigenous knowledge about our relatedness. Gaye opens the song by calling out, ‘Mother, mother,’ and addresses his listeners as if they were his family: ‘Brother, brother . . . Sister, sister . . . Father, father.’

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From a Haudenosaunee and Indigenous perspective, this call would extend to include ‘Grandmother, grandmother . . . Grandfather, grandfather . . . Auntie, auntie . . . Uncle, uncle.’ It would also acknowledge animal relations and other elements of the natural world (plants, water, earth, sky). In the Haudenosaunee creation story, Sky Woman falls (or is pushed) from a hole in Sky World, and as she falls, a motley crew of animals come to her aid, each creature assisting according to its unique talents: turtle offers his shell as land, muskrat gets mud from the bottom of the sea to make soil for things to grow in, and so on. To acknowledge how animals helped Sky Woman settle on what we now call Turtle Island, the Haudenosaunee consider them our First Teachers. Our clans are also named after animals to recognize this foundational relationship.”

Skywalker/Skyscraper (Forest), 2021. Installation image, detail.

“As in the early seventies, significant social and political unrest permeates the current moment: the Flint water crisis; the Standing Rock protests and the Water Protectors; the Black Lives Matter movement; the fight for climate justice; the COVID-19 pandemic, all of these matters and more are calling us to understand our relatedness. In response to 39

these events, and in the context of both the Haudenosaunee creation story and Marvin Gaye’s song, I’ve been wondering what the world would look like if we considered ourselves companion species rather than disconnected adversaries. Can saying a word, like mother, change our relationship to a concept? Can certain words prompt us to consider our relatedness or interconnectedness, not just in the present moment, but backward and forward in time? How does saying such words conjure up relations known and unknown, relations past and relations future?”

For Watt, when a word is doubled, she calls it “twinning language,” which suggests an echo, a calling back and a calling forward. In “What’s Going On,” Gaye sings each name not once, but twice: “Mother, mother. Brother, brother.” He is calling out, and it’s an emphatic call. Watt sees this as a yearning call. “An urgent call. A long-distance call through space and time, hurling the words out further and further in an attempt to link us with our ancestors and with future generations, begging us to act.”

Watt’s installation, “Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest”, is offered as pairings. Blanket stacks are not available individually. All “Skywalker/Skyscraper” blanket pairs are made from reclaimed blankets, reclaimed cedar, and steel I-beams.

Available pairs for “Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest” are: Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Grandmother) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Grandfather) (displayed at The Art Show 2023, Booth A12) Also Available: Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Mother) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Father) Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Auntie) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Uncle) Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Sister) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Brother)

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Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Grandmother) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Grandfather), 2021 Grandmother: 84 x 16 x 16 inches; Grandfather: 60 x 16 x 16 inches.

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Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Sister) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Brother), 2021 Sister: 51 x 16 x 16 inches; Brother: 64 x 16 x 16 inches.

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Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Auntie) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Uncle), 2021 Auntie: 53 x 16 x 16 inches; Uncle: 45 x 16 x 16 inches.

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Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Mother) and Skywalker/Skyscraper: Forest (Father), 2021 Mother: 75 x 16 x 16 inches; Father: 48 x 16 x 16 inches.

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Skywalker Greets Sunrise VI, 2021

Steel I-beam, spray painted, mirror-finish cap.

Suitable for indoor or outdoor installation.

78 x 23 x 23 inches.

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Vivid Dream (Blossom), 2023

Photogravure on gampi with calico fabric prints, collage, string, silver leaf.

Published by Mullowney Printing, Portland OR. Edition of 15+ proofs. Sheet: 18 x 14 inches.

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Vivid Dream (Liberty), 2023

Photogravure on gampi with calico fabric prints of Indigenous trade cloth, collage, string, and silver leaf. Published by Mullowney Printing, Portland OR. Edition of 10+ proofs. Sheet: 31 1/2 x 19 inches.

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Horizon: Ancient and Young Observer (V.1), 2023

Woodcut on hand-dyed Sekishu with silver leaf embellishment.

Horizon: Ancient and Young Observer (Ghost), 2023 Woodcut on hand-dyed Sekishu.

Both works are printed by Harry Schneider, assisted by Alejandra Arias Sevilla and Lori Linton.

Published by Mullowney Printing, Portland OR.

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20 3/4 x 92 inches. Edition of 10.

20 3/4 x 92 inches. Proof edition of 5AP.

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Marie Watt | TURTLE ISLAND, 2022 Marie watt writes: “I grew up knowing Turtle Island as a Seneca and Haudenosaunee understanding of place and creation. While the origins of the story might differ, Turtle Island is shared in common with other Woodlands tribes including the Anishinaabe and Lenape. For some communities, Turtle Island is the continent, North America, for others it is planet earth. The story of Turtle Island exists in a multitude of forms.

What does it mean to say a pair of words when you don’t know their origin? How does it roll around in one’s mind or spill off one’s tongue? Does it conjure an image or experience as if evoked by poetry?

“Indigenous people are often expected to translate stories, memories, and knowledge to those outside our communities. By boldly “stitching” the words TURTLE ISLAND in neon and placing them in unexpected sites, I subvert expectation. I hope to catch people off guard and prompt connections that might linger and encourage deeper inquiry and understanding. If names are a construct, then I (and people who use this phrase) deconstruct and restore the place name ‘North America’ into Turtle Island as an offering and course correction. This phrase, a term of endearment, story and title, is ancient and modern, sovereign and instructional. The act of amplifying Turtle Island is an act of resistance. When you say it, even if you don’t know what it means, it affirms an important story. It resets the way we walk, wander, swim, and build shelters as though experienced through a new lens. If we recognize a place name that precedes colonial names, it can be a step toward acknowledging historical trauma, and a legacy of extraction and displacement.”

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TURTLE ISLAND, 2022

Neon glass tubing, aluminum, steel, transformers, and dimmer.

Fabricated by Lite Brite Neon, NY. Artwork dimensions: TURTLE: 37 1/4 x 151 x 9 1/2 inches ISLAND: 34 1/2 x 149 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches.

Total installation when installed linearly: 37 1/4 x 300 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches.

Suitable for indoor or outdoor installation, and can be installed linearly or stacked.

Unique work in a series of neon sculptures.

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Companion Species (Anthem), 2017

Four-color woodcut on Somerset satin white.

Printed by TMP Frank Janzen. Published by Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts.

Edition of 14 + proofs. Edition 2/14: Last available edition.

Sheet and image: 17 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches; Frame: 20 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches.

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