| NATIVE
ARTISTS COLLECTIVE - POSTCOMMODITY
The video projections, one projection
on each side of the pallet of cinder blocks, provide continually
looped footage of birds indigenous to Tohono O’odham lands,
thermal imagery of Mexican immigrants “illegally” crossing
the US Border, suburban landscapes emerging from the desert
Southwest and a textual narrative in six languages (Cherokee,
Navajo, Pawnee, Czech, English and German). The large scale
two-dimensional mixed-media wall mountings provide semiotic
references to ineffectual consumer bird repellent products.
The sound collage is constructed from field recordings,
tape manipulations of conversations and language lessons,
distorted bird songs, various instruments (home made and
conventional) and amplified feedback. Collectively, the
sum of the parts provide a metanarrative exploration of
21st Century postcolonial experience in the Americas; an
examination of the struggle for Indigenous balance and cultural
sustainability within a politically and economically contested
geographic space; the complex and often antagonistic interactions
of land, flesh, culture, political identity and development.
All the Way To The Suburbs explores how the nouveau riche
imagination of United States policy makers and land developers
configure and manage geographic spaces -- from international
borders to internal suburbs -- by utilizing entirely unnatural
methods to alter landscapes, within international geopolitical
contexts and domestic private sector contexts, and in the
process of doing so, thoroughly deny the inherent sovereign
relationships that exist between Indigenous cultures and
land.
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