In this exhibition, I present recent works including the video work Tree and the première of a new photographic installation entitled La Pietà.
Tree pays homage to the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign showing on television across the continent in the early 1970s. Iron Eyes Cody appeared as the stereotypical Indian as he looks around the environment and sees that the landscape is no longer being cared for and that there is little respect for it. He cries one big tear. Even though Iron Eyes isn’t Native and the campaign played on the “stoic representation,” I feel this is a representation we can look at as a role model. Caring for Mother Earth should be our biggest concern at the moment.
In Michelangelo’s Pietà, the mother holds her dead son. Even if I didn’t know some art history I could look at the sculpture and feel for the woman as she lovingly holds the man. It is here where I associate this image with the contemporary worldview of war from a woman’s perspective. I know Michelangelo’s Pietà is a religious notion but it is a universal one of grief. In my La Pietà, I’ve juxtaposed landscape with a young man’s chest. The landscape shows infinite beauty while the young man’s chest shows physical beauty. The two beauties become expendable resources. [S.N.]