“Trans-Earth Objects”

The politics of my work is in constant flux. Maybe this is because my own identity is in a constant flux or maybe it is because the rapid movement of information today keeps one in a constant state of questioning. My primary investigation for the last several years has gyrate between decolonizing and feminizing the aesthetics of 60s–70s land art/earthworks.

As much as I appreciate the mythological imprint of works such as Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, I could not let go of the fact that there was something missing. They were talking about big, open, free, desolate, absent of people, geological locations, but what about the land that Spiral Jetty sat on. Who occupied that land first? Had that land been “empty” in the past?
The myth-building of these artists required no such acknowledgment. This is what the indigenous individual inside of me had to say. How could someone make land art but leave it free of the history of the people who occupied that land, to begin with? I can trace my blood through photocopied tribal cards and family trees.

I am Prio / Manso / Tiwa, a collage of colonization. Ideally, my work is displayed in a domesticated space, leaving some objects only one or two steps away from their original home. An awkward stance where
the objects now dominate the space, they take it over and render it unusable based on its original use. Something happens in this exchange from domesticated objects to art object. A near-complete separation at its handoff from home to gallery. In the gallery, my objects are a medium to be used in the field of minimalism. When they are at home, they may be paperweights, door stops blankets for a guest, fire pits, art, ashtrays, greenhouses, furniture, and so on. When they are in a gallery, they are being exhibited. They are an object used to perform the roles of minimalism. Decisions are made on their structure, color, weight, reflexivity, mass, and how those various qualities interact with each other.