ADDITIONAL INF0

"Hoomontwash" appears as the name of Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes, a key historical figure among the Mutsun Ohlone people in California. She was an accomplished healer, social worker, and the last fluent speaker of the Mutsun language.

"Yaquenonsat" was a 19th-century Ohlone woman from the Sumus tribe and a key leader in the Indigenous resistance against Spanish colonization at Mission Santa Cruz, California.

"Toypurina" (c. 1760–1799) was a revered Tongva medicine woman and spiritual leader who led a rebellion against Spanish colonists at Mission San Gabriel in 1785.

Artist Statement

If cartography, through its translation of space into quantifiable measurements, is a form of colonization- I seek a language of place that refuses reduction through the multiplicity of perspective. Smithson’s theory of entropy, a process of deterioration that is conditioned by irreversibility, has driven my art practice. My work extends from my direct experiences in landscapes that are entropic, and maps conflicting forces that contribute to their transformation.

I track my body's movement over land through the use of wearable cameras similar to those used by surveillance systems and extreme sports. I film in environments that are ecologically precarious and marked by colonial violence. The image frames my body against the land, and my gestures are choreographed by the topography and material present in the place. The progression of the image is monotonous and the viewer is captured by the downward gaze of the camera, the image avoids escape through a horizon. Voice over, sound design, and image overlays are added during the editing process, which are sourced from archival research, conversations, quoted texts, and interviews. Video editing allows me to bring in multiple and potentially contradictory perspectives and content.

I am interested in the possibility of a material practice that results in dematerialization. I work with a living material called adobe, which is a mix of sand, clay, and soil. Adobe belongs to desert cultures and has been used to make architecture and land based technologies since time immemorial, it also is the material my grandmother made bricks with. In 2016, during a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, I started to work with the material. I made a large cast floor sculpture that was in dialogue with Minimalism's spatial concerns through forms that reference the ecological pressures of water democracies in New Mexico.

Channel- A Cartography of Thirst was a 15 foot long adobe casting paired with a projected image of a digital map that identifies homonymic meanings of the word "channel" (the casting has since been recycled to make new work). Adobe is not a material that will last forever, it is brittle, it sheds, it cracks, and it melts if exposed to water. I am interested in adobe's refusal to be fixed or preserved, and therefore challenge preservation models that are practiced in systems of museum and private collections.

Currently I am working with aesthetic interventions into state archives in California and national archives in the United States, specifically the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the Huntington Library, mission archives of the Catholic church, the California Department of Water Resources, and the National Archives of the US. During an artist residency at the ICA San Diego in 2021 I filmed a performance for video at Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, in Soledad, California. My Chalon ancestors were captured and imprisoned in the mission during the mission era from 1769 until about 1833, then migrated to San Luis Obispo, then to Bakersfield. The piece is titled Niniwas, to belong here and considers the site of the mission as both a living archive and a site of Indigenous futurism. The piece developed out of work I had been making since 2019 around a public school project I was assigned in the fourth grade known as the mission report. The project includes large scale works on paper, a public art piece, sculpture, and video. The work questions the validity and transparency of official archived documents and the colonial functions they perform. During the project the National Archives in San Francisco found my great-grandfather's handwritten application for the Enrollment with the Indians of the State of California under the Act of May 18, 1928. The document becomes physical material for a sculpture in which I weave each page of the document into a series of adobe mound forms. The mounds sit on wall mounted stands overtop the printed vinyl image of each page of the document. The blackened steel shelf and adobe and vinyl mounds cover the details of each page of the document, performing a redaction of bureaucratic erasure of Indigenous identity.

Artistically, research drives my ideas and ideas determine aesthetics. My practice is a negotiation between what is physically present in landscape, and its subsequent memories, to pose future imaginaries. I seek long-term engagement with places and their people as a means of exploring my own identity that is intimately formed by land and community.