About 10 years ago, the subject of MANIFEST DESTINY arose in relation to works of art I made appropriating ancient Southwest Indian and Navajo designs, the confluence of the ubiquitously “AMERICAN” mass-produced plastic discs that are the support or ground for painted images of aboriginal Indian origin by a post-Anglo-Saxon artist.

I wondered about the historical origins of our claim to ”chosen ness”, continental expansionism, what form of manifest destiny is manifested on our present culture of multiculturalism and globalization and also myself?

Some research broadened my purview on the subject and alleviated my interest until I began making work for this exhibition inspired by a trip to the Pacific Northwest in 1999, the furthest point in the continental United States, conflated with a desire to incorporate material from Stanley Kubric’s futuristic film “2001 – A SPACE ODYSSEY”.

I had studied the art of the Northwest Coast Indians, drawn to the graphic quality although humbled by its sophistication, and planned to make a work with contrasting forms of representation, again the confluence of cultures. This realization, during the process, determined the title of the first two pieces and the subject of the show: MANIFEST DESTINY, “a future event accepted as inevitable”. A similar historical projectionism pervades the film.

The resulting works: drawings, painted discs and wall paintings employing various forms of Northwest Coast Indian art along with elements from the film and our contemporary culture of the perpetual present, make no claim to illustrate this concept, it’s a conceptual thread running through it. Consider this exhibition my odyssey, “an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest” in the year 2001.

NORTHWEST COAST INDIAN REFERENCES

The COPPER. Decorated sheets of beaten copper in a shield-shape form resembling a salmon laid open for drying on the rack, primarily functions as an index of surplus wealth and prestige in Northwest Coast Indian culture. It is considered to be alive and conceptually related to the salmon. Copper is also a material of magical properties linked with health, brightness, light and other elements basic to life, even death and resurrection.

SISIUTL. The double-headed serpent with a head in the center having stylized human features is a supernatural being that can transform itself into many forms. Sisiutl guards the entrances to the houses of the supernatural creatures and kills and eats the flesh of those who see it. The people would sometimes paint Sisiutl over the doorways of their houses for protection. Sisiutl is central to themes of warrior power, strength, and invulnerability because of its ability to cause death and the contrasting theme of revival. Warriors used the Sisiutl figure as a headband, a belt, a bow, and painted the figure on canoes, then painted over them, when hunting at sea. Sisiutl is depicted in circular, (if so, with some image at the center), horizontal and vertical formats.

The SISIUTL POWERBOARD is used in Tokwit dance rituals, conjured up from the ground and flying through the air.

Northwest Coast Indian tribes developed a unique art form utilizing blankets, which they had traded for pelts. The button blankets, used as cloaks, consist of red appliquéd designs of native motifs on a dark background with buttons outlining the forms. My button painting takes an Indian tree motif and transforms it into AXIS MUNDI, the great cosmic tree and world axis, part of many ancient world belief systems, with its spreading crown reaching into and supporting the heavens, its roots in the underworld. In this painting of Axis Mundi, the roots are eagle talons that in Northwest Coast Indian designs resemble an eagle head. The oval symbolizes both an entrance to a house, as in traditional totem mouth or entryways and the passageway at the horizon where the earth and sky meet. This place is envisioned as a paradoxical or dangerous place where brave men and shamans passed into, in ancient times, to retrieve souls, obtain knowledge and spirit power from the celestial realm.

Primary vehicles of transformation, masks merge mythological past with the living present. The mask of Gakhula, THE INTRUDER, used in the Klasila dance ritual would interrupt the proceedings and engaged in a mock struggle with the attendants, subdued and ejected from the house.

HOKHOKW, one of three supernatural birds in the Hamatsa dance ritual, said to have cracked open human skulls to eat the brains.