The Future All At Once, McMullen Gallery. 2019.
The presence of Indigenous people today remains at odds with ongoing settler imaginings of our disappearance.
With each portrait I refuse a romanticized notion that Indigenous people are timeless beings. I would like to disentangle Indigenous imagery from the past, free Indigenous people from a performative role to bring us visually in the present so we can see ourselves existing firmly in the future.
In this portrait series, I explored my own community by photographing and painting them. Many of the people I am close to while others I shared a brief encounter with. I paint people as they are with no instruction of how they should represent themselves. These images don’t claim to be a perfect representation of the sitter, but a brief moment in time that describes their presence.
Grasping the Indigenous form with paint is an inexhaustible pursuit.
Here you will see Indigenous people today, as they are.
