--> Sunday, FEBRUARY 16th, 2014 @ 7 PM
real transitions, ideal musings
by Joan Waltemath & Shelby Kaye
Joan Waltemath and Shelby Kaye have collaborated to create a performance that begins to explore the burden of non-Indian idealizations of the American Indian and the possibility of transforming this commonly held stereotype. Using costumes created for the event, chopped up 2 x 4’s, ribbons of text, and earthen balls, the duo will attempt to unearth a means to free the mind from centuries of idolization/idealization and its flipside. Special Guest Ruth Hardinger will join in to draw ‘earth wounds’ on a map of the Northern Great Plains.
The performance, which takes Philip DeLoria’s Playing Indian as its point of departure, is part of Waltemath’s Treaty of 1868 project. Funded by Creative Capital in 2012, the project reflects on cultural relations in the former Plains Indian territories. A series of eight large-scale paintings yet to be completed, coupled with performances, pose questions about subjects that have been repressed and peoples who have been written out of the future by mainstream culture. By looking at the fallout from the broken treaty, including the physical and cultural genocide it unleashed, as well as the underlying guilt of those who profited from it, the project asks us to consider how to begin a movement towards the healing of historical trauma.
Joan Waltemath grew up on the Great Plains. Her abstract paintings focus on constructing spatial voids using harmonic progressions and non-traditional, reflective pigments in oils, as well as drawings. Shown in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, London, Basel and Cologne, her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Harvard University Art Museum, among others. She has written for numerous art publications and served as editor-at-large of the Brooklyn Rail since 2001. She is director of MICA’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting.
Shelby Kaye, who is Joan Waltemath’s niece, also grew up on the Great Plains and is descendent from native peoples in the Southwestern Pueblo region. She creates sculptural performances and videos using diverse materials. C urrently enrolled at NYU, she has studied at RISD, Pratt Institute and Parson’s School of Design. In 2012 she was the recipient of a scholarship from the Steinhart School of Art, Culture and Human Development at NYU.
Photos from event:
