INSTALLATION.

SPIRITS FOR SALE

Broad Art Center, Los Angeles, California.

 April 2010

       In this installation I use three outside source materials to create an informative dialogue about spiritual worth in a Capitalistic society. The first component, is an edited version of the film, White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men (1996), directed by Terry Macy and Daniel Hart.  This film documents interviews of white and Native American individuals. However, I chose to edit out the interviews by European Americans. I chose to do this because I believed the interviews to be one-sided and focusing on a small part of a particularly big idea. To counter this video, I chose to include the first seven or so minutes of the film, Experience the Rainbow (1978). This film documents the first Rainbow family gathering and features interviews and footage of the original participants. The two videos, both about seven minutes long, would intermittently turn on and off, sometimes looping perfectly in sync and sometimes over one another.

        On the wall next to the Native American video, was a quote by anthropologist Lisa Alderidge. The quote reads, “Their commercialization of Native American spirituality articulates well within late-twentieth- century consumer capitalism. There is strong historical and social evidence that the commercialization of ideas and values as well as the fetishized image of a social body perceived to be ethnically Other, stems in part from thought and practices produced within the context of recent consumer capitalism… Their imperialistically nostalgic fetishization of Native American spirituality hinders any recognition of their own historical complicity in the oppression of indigenous peoples” (excerpt from White Shamanism and Astroturf Sundances)

         In the middle of the room was an aesthetically determined formation of personal sacred objects. Ideally, the viewer would sit amidst these objects and discern their validity individually. It is important to note that all items were either given, exchanged, discovered, harvested, or, stolen. Their composition is symbolic of what I the owner/creator find most aesthetically pleasing with the most amount or proper orientation (i.e. chronologically).

          These four aspects of the installation create a strong dialogue between opposing views and ideals along with evoking the viewer to dwell and question what they think is to be the most valid as well as the most accepting viewpoint. In 2011 I exhibited a second installation which took on a new aesthetic syntax through a larger system of text and objects.