Touching the sky: Artist Ramona Sakiestewa @ TAI Modern
By Iris McLister for the Santa Fe New Mexican, Sept 2017
In Light Echoes, Ramona Sakiestewa’s lyrically named show at Tai Modern, the artist expands upon long-standing tenets of her practice: elegantly arranged prints and collaged works whose subject matter wavers gently on the cusp of abstraction, and is often adorned with gold-and-silver-leaf detailing that’s simultaneously dazzling and restrained. But in her latest body of work, Sakiestewa also draws inspiration from artifacts and ephemera that existed thousands of years in the past, reconceiving them in highly refined, hypermodern ways. The experience of seeing the artwork in this show feels something like stumbling across a time capsule that’s packed not only with objects from a distant, otherworldly past, but also with things that offer glimpses of an equally remote future. Sakiestewa said, “The series feels like a complete departure for me, in that most of my work is abstracted, but the patterns here are much more literal — even if they’re grounded in prehistoric imagery.”
In 2016, the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology put out a call to indigenous artists to apply for a five-day residency program called the Chaco Heritage Project. Participants gained access to the museum’s Chaco archaeological collections and those of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park Museum, and Sakiestewa, a Hopi Native who was born in Albuquerque, was one of 10 artists selected for the residency. The 18 works in Light Echoes are divided into four distinctive groups, each inspired by imagery that Sakiestewa encountered during her residency. Chaco Canyon was a thriving, highly sophisticated cultural hub between A.D. 850 and 1250. The settlement is nestled between the present-day Navajo and Jicarilla Apache reservations in the northwest part of New Mexico, and stories of its long-gone Pueblo inhabitants are told through petroglyphs, pottery sherds, and even shells and chocolate.
In Sakiestewa’s Sherds series, a quartet of paper collages contain blocky black shapes alongside areas of delicate watercolor, overlaid with stripes or zigzags of silver leaf. Deep matte red beneath it all makes a striking visual contrast that also feels deeply grounding. With their snatches of patterned and truncated design elements, the collages could be interpreted as broken-apart pieces of a larger artwork — much like the actual pottery sherds from which Sakiestewa drew her inspiration. Similarly fragmented elements play across the surfaces of the four Dance Wand monoprints, inspired by unusually well-preserved, painted wood objects which Sakiestewa imagined as ceremonial dance wands. Jagged segments of these wands appear amidst predominantly pale grey and red compositions. Polka-dotted bits of silver leaf are spread on top like drops of snow, intensifying the works’ strangely wintry sensibility: It’s like studying a chunk of ice that’s thawing before us to reveal symbols and shapes of ancient origin.
Sakiestewa remarked that for her, the process of creating the exhibition’s three Light Echo paintings was the most surprising. “I haven’t painted in a gazillion years,” she laughed, “so it was really exciting to work in that medium.” The artist’s enthusiasm translates into swirlingly abstracted, many-colored designs overlaid with gold-leafed squares, and part of the pleasure of this trio of works is getting close enough to try to decipher the patterns beneath the shining gold shapes.
Perhaps the most commanding works in the exhibition are the three ravens, loosely abstracted but wholly recognizable depictions of birds whose significance resonates across a plethora of Native cultures. “I closed my weaving studio in 2009,” Sakiestewa said, “so there was a drive to do something with thread.” Wings and talons cut from monoprints and reassembled against crisp, white paper backgrounds are crisscrossed with lines of shimmery metallic thread. The bird’s disassembled bodies contain origami-like folds, indicating Sakiestewa’s longstanding interest in Japanese design. “The Japanese aesthetic is my go-to, kind of an anchor for me. Japan’s artists are so good at pulling out the essence of an object in such a clean way.” A pull-it-apart then put-it-together drive was behind a trio of monoprints called the Ceramic series, which look like segments of densely patterned clay vessels. “I love the deconstructed, abstract patterning of prehistoric ceramics, and I wanted to look at those ancient pots and reinterpret them into something new,” she said.
In an essay for the catalog that accompanies Light Echoes, Sakiestewa reminisces about camping trips to Chaco Canyon that she took decades ago. “At night,” she writes, “the clarity of visible planets, the moon and stars was not compromised by any electric lights. The density of the Milky Way and starlight that arced across the sky made it seem like I could reach up and touch it.” In this meticulously conceived and lushly rendered body of work, it’s as if Sakiestewa indeed managed to not only reach up and touch the sky’s magic, but also to spread it out before us in all of its constellate, time-transcending beauty.