Gallery EXHIBITION

WE HAVE TEETH TOO

OCTOBER 10, 2020 – DECEMBER 19, 2020

Natalie Ball, Jordan Ann Craig, Emma Robbins, Amanda Roy
Curated by Natani Notah

Curator’s Statement
Artist & Curator Bios

GRAMMAR FOR THE TIME TRAVELER:
IT’S NEVER THE SIMPLE PAST NOR THE PAST PERFECT.

essay by GENEVIEVE QUICK

For many of us who come from historically marginalized and colonized communities, we are time travelers: we attempt to locate the past, act in the present, and imagine the future. In this amorphous sense of time we negotiate historic representations that defined our “authenticity” as “primitive” and “Other” while participating in contemporary culture. As language shapes how we construct the past, time travelers require specific grammar to frame the ways we straddle time. In English grammar, simple past and past perfect are not just ironic, but the former suggests that there are abrupt shifts in which actions are simply in the past and the latter considers that when an action, a verb, is completed, things are perfect. American history is not simple and it is far from perfect. However, English grammar is not fruitless. As past continuous describes actions starting in the past and continuing to the present, it acknowledges that completion may not be a definite act, thus affording time travelers a more flexible grammar. The artists included in the expansive and rich collection of works in We have teeth too, curated by Natani Notah, straddle time to complexly intersect indigeneity with history and the present. As these artists point to the past and present simultaneously, they highlight the ways in which history is neither simple nor perfect and dive into the fluidity of the past continuous that enables re-authoring, renaming, and re-contextualizing.

NATALIE BALL

NATALIE BALL’s current work explores gesture and materiality to create textiles and sculptures as Power Objects. She offers her objects as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and consumed narrative and identity, without absolutes. She believes historical discourses of Native Americans have constructed a limited and inconsistent visual archive that currently misrepresents our past experiences and misinforms current expectations. 

Natalie excavates hidden histories and dominant narratives to deconstruct them through a theoretical framework of auto-ethnography — to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses in order to build a visual genealogy that refuses to line up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans. The goal is for her art to lend itself as new texts, with new histories and new manifestations, to add to the discussion of complex racial narratives that are critical to further realizing the self, the nation, and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories.

JORDAN ANN CRAIG

I used to be wildly shy and a little superstitious. I feared crinkled paper and olives. I thought it was bad luck to clip my fingernails before big tests or competitions. I dreaded sleeping alone or speaking on the phone. Coloring outside the lines was a big no. I was incapable of telling lies, even white ones. I have not changed too much. My mother tells me her greatest gift is Native American blood: Northern Cheyenne and a little Zuni. She also gifted me her odd sense of humor, extreme competitiveness, and tremendous resilience.

 My work keeps me up at night and gets me out of bed in the morning. I've forgotten how to sleep. I tell stories about my childhood, family, trauma, healing, and the appealing mundane. Working in series, I explore subjects like forgetting how to sleep, my relationship with my sisters, the life of an unlucky ladybug, and the translation of language and dreams. The dots and shapes are my words; the stories are in their rhythm. 

 My work is often beautiful, masking ugly histories. I keep Indigenous textiles, beads, pottery, and landscapes in my periphery when I make art. My work is the exploration of existence, time, and space, woven from cultural memory and epiphany. The process is meticulous and meditative, often obsessive in mark and repetition. My personality, quirks, history, and family are inevitable influences in my life, all fundamental to how and what I create. I seek to balance the familiar and the mysterious, shared stories and secrets.

–JORDAN ANN CRAIG

EMMA ROBBINS

These four works are a selection from EMMA ROBBIN’s series Tseebíítsáadah.

With a simple “X” mark to represent the signatures of tribal leaders who did not speak, read, or write English, 18 treaties were signed between the United States Government and the Native Nations of California in the mid 1800s. In a formal agreement, these treaties promised goods such as needles, thimbles, cloth, and livestock, and designated reservation lands for these tribes. However, immediately following the signing of these treaties, they were lost and never ratified, and the Native Nations lost their homelands — and cultures — to the US Government. Robbins explores these forgotten promises in hand-stitched works that represent these treaties in combination with those treaties of her own reservation.

Drawing materials from home, the Navajo Nation, and those that were never to be, these works show us both age-old and modern-day Indigenous issues, including broken treaties, inaccurate and romanticized Native imagery, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis. While highlighting these tough truths, Robbins tells us these stories with elements of humor and an “if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry” mindset that many Native people have adopted, not only as a coping mechanism, but as a way to keep resilient in historical and modern times. 

The items used in the selection of these treaties were foraged by the artist on trips home and to other reservations, purchased at gas stations, local trading posts, and arts and crafts supply stores. These items have a particular significance unique to Native peoples, and comment on often misunderstood pan-Indigeneity and pan-Rez life. Ultimately, Robbins’ treaties are a celebration of and humorous meditation on Rez life, resilience, and Diné identity.

AMANDA ROY

It’s a common misperception that the photographs of Edward S. Curtis required those posing for him to hold their poses for long periods of time. Many assume that the process he used was wet-plate photography, which can require exposure times of less than a second up to five minutes depending on lighting conditions, with the overall process needing to be completed within fifteen minutes or before the plate dried. The successor to wet plate is dry plate, which can require up to four seconds of exposure time depending on lighting conditions with no time limit on the overall process. Curtis shot dry plate glass negatives, which he then developed in the field when he had time.

The method and required exposure time is important because there is a commonly held belief that the reason none of his subjects smiled was because of the long exposure times required, rather than a stylistic choice of the photographer. Curtis was known for staging his photos with props and costumes, but he isn’t as known for also staging the expressions of those he photographed to match his perception of Native Americans as a vanishing people whose images he needed to preserve before they were gone forever. He created stereotypes that affect Native American lives to this day.

The photographs Curtis took are often what people reference when they think of Native Americans because, for many, it was their first encounter with — and formed their first impressions of — Native American lives and ways of being. Stoic, savage, wild, emotionless, dehumanized, poor, and beat-down people of the past who suffered through hard times such as the loss of their land and people, and then quietly vanished without a reason to smile or laugh. His cultivated images have created this disconnect with Native American identity both past and present, with people thinking all of the injustices we have experienced are in the past and are no longer modern-day issues. Meanwhile, they have never stopped and are still ongoing. We still continue to fight for our land, our children, our people, our languages, our culture, our ways of being, our representation, and our future generations. We are not people of the past; we are people of the future, as we are always looking forward.

I was born and raised in my community with lots of love, laughter, joking, affection, and smiling along with the larger array of emotions we are all capable of feeling. Laughter and humor are so core and central to our ways of being. Even in the hardest of times, we find laughter, we find humor, and we find smiles. These are the things that kept us going and these are what I grew up with. I wasn’t familiar with Curtis until I was invited to a well-known museum for a talk. I was given a book of his photographs as a gift, and as I sat in my hotel room later looking through it, I felt so disconnected and removed from these people who in reality were of the same generation of my great grandparents and could quite possibly be relatives. My great grandparents did not look or dress like the people in this book; nobody I knew did. I looked up more of his photos and the dates they were taken, feeling unsettled. It wasn’t until I started exploring wet-plate photography that I realized how staged these really were and how harmful they are. 

Once I started adding smiles to them, they began to look familiar, and as I began to connect with them, they started to feel like family — they started to feel like home.

All photos by Minoosh Zomorodinia unless otherwise noted