James Fuentes is pleased to present Young Elder, featuring work by Andrea Carlson, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Tyrrell Tapaha, and Nico Williams and curated by Natalie Ball and Zach Feuer. In an episode of Reservation Dogs, a TV series about the lives of Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma, two influencers are invited to a community center for a Native American Reclamation and Decolonization Symposium. While rattling off self-righteous accolades, one of the speakers refers to himself as a “young elder”—an oxymoron that inspires a communal eye roll from the audience. The scene’s satire invites the question: what does it mean to express the wisdom of millennia through a contemporary practice? In Young Elder, four artists—emerging and mid-career—present recent work that references or applies Indigenous material and pictorial traditions as they are considered and carried on in the current day.
Through complex compositions that interlace Ojibwe and colonial narratives, Andrea Carlson’s practice questions what happens when the personal and impersonal intersect. With painting, drawing, and installation, she explores institutional critique from within the institution, mapping landscapes that expose unrecognized histories and re-envision worlds—making space for Indigenous communities to share their own narratives rather than have their experiences shared on their behalf. The Indifference of Fire, a twenty-four panel suite of ink, oil, acrylic, gouache, graphite, watercolor, and pen on paper, is a collage of four stacked landscapes with multiple horizon lines wherein the viewer is invited to wander through a continuous topography of symbols.
This work is an antidote to toxic and “bad medicine” narratives that stereotype Indigenous culture, layering references to plants and animals that symbolize healing and inhabit the thin margins where survival happens. One such detail is the white-throated sparrow, a bird with four chromosomal genders that ensures the continuation of its species. Compositionally, the work challenges colonial European traditions of landscape as a bordered space, for which each sheet of paper alludes to the treaties and deeds used to rupture and colonize Indigenous land. Thematically, the diverse flora and fauna challenge the fixed codes of Western allegory, encouraging metaphors that expand rather than contract meaning.
Working in mixed-media painting and sculpture, Sonya Kelliher-Combs explores the social, psychological, and environmental dimensions of her Alaskan heritage, considering how her identity impacts and influences the work she creates. The artist’s practice revisits and expands upon themes from her upbringing such as her community’s subsistence and utilitarian traditions—historically associated with women’s roles. Incorporating natural and artificial materials, Kelliher-Combs’ pieces implicate the viewer in acknowledging that disposable and built environments have endangered the natural state of the world, urging for a restored responsibility to the land we occupy and share.
Pink Slips is a sculpture series that references her culture’s custom of stretching animal skins. While some of her works incorporate real furs and hides, these pieces are synthetic paint “skins”—sculptures resembling hung fabric that are created by gradually layering coats of gel medium and acrylic polymer. Embossed with impressions of organic matter, Kelliher-Combs’ presents these slips as the surface through which an individual mediates—and is scarred by—experience, addressing the physical and emotional abuse of women and children. Known as MMIW, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis, the slips touch on this movement which strives to recognize the untold histories of violence against Indigenous women.
Tyrrell Tapaha is a Diné weaver who preserves centuries-old techniques that have been passed down through their family for six generations. Throughout the Navajo Nation, weavings have always been a symbol of protection, livelihood, warmth, and utility. The artist considers what it means to be a weaver at this particular moment in history, adding a contemporary perspective to the legacy of their material. With a background in forestry and ecological restoration, they participate in each stage of the weaving process, a pastoral lifestyle carried on by very few people in their community. Throughout the year, Tapaha herds Navajo-Churro sheep, then shears, skirts, washes, and spins the wool. Each spool is dyed with vegetation from the surrounding Four Corners region, with hues extracted from fruits and plants like prickly pear, juniper, mountain mahogany, walnuts, and sagebrush.
Nico Williams’ work begins with the found object. The artist is drawn to debris that he collects from his surrounding Hochelaga neighborhood in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal—materials coded with economic, political, and societal conditions. In the studio, he creates a digital rendering of the found object that is then used as a pattern for its recreation stringing together glass beads with thermally bonded weaving thread resulting in an intricate and sparkling soft sculpture. In this presentation, Williams creates a dialogue between four beaded sculptures: a flier for a supermarket, a strip of danger tape, an Amazon delivery box, and a wallet containing his Indigenous status card.
James Fuentes | 55 Delancey Street, New York
For further inquiries please contact James Fuentes at moc.setneufsemaj@semaj or Katrin Lewinsky at moc.setneufsemaj@lk.
