Featured Artist:
Dates:
11/15/2019 – 1/18/2020
Location:
Spudnik Press Cooperative, 1821 West Hubbard, Chicago IL 60622
Corresponding Events:
Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind | Opening Reception & Artist Talk
Exhibition Statement:
Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind explores a move from the prairies of North Dakota to the urban environment of Chicago. The exhibition considers Jessica Christy’s transplanted indigenous identity, one connected to place, in the midst of a culture shock. While exploring a new city, both foreign and known images were gathered: deer hair, parking signs, coyote tracks, municipal tickets, bird feathers, and corner store signs. Through self-applied cultural guilt and gender expectations, visuals emerge that suggest the artist’s voice is becoming comfortable in the 21st century metropolis.
As traditional printmaking moves from a commercial process to fine art editions to a contemporary medium, artists are continually exploring new matrices and substrates and their conceptual implications. The work in Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind stems from a fascination with this contemporary shift. Images are transferred through print onto surfaces found and gathered in Chicago. The artist’s cultural and personal transition from the Great Plains to an urban Chicago environment is represented on found wood, fabric, and other surfaces through text and imagery gathered in a daily journal. Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind employs these new substrates to intimately speak to the artist’s experiences of cultural disconnect, domestic struggles, and a general liaison with her new environment.
Artist Bio:
Christy is a native North Dakotan, born to two artists on the Sanger Art Farm, located at the northern edge of the Sheyenne River Valley. She received her MFA from the University of North Dakota in 2011 and has since created works that challenge the status quo of human activity and the resulting impacts. Heavily influenced by her upbringing in the Dakota and Lakota cultures, Christy weaves the Native experience into her work. She has shown both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find further information at www.jessicachristy.com.