It Wasn't the Dream of Golden Cities

Artist Statement: The 400th Anniversary of Santa Fe has become a stage for revisionist discourse reaffirming the Western imagination’s obsession with teasing out gratifying and generative functions from Spanish colonialism, the pragmatism and inevitability of the market (which brought the Spanish here in the first place), and the systematic processes of genocide that resulted. While the spectacle has been largely comprised of blunt, chauvinistic objects, the aggregated subtext extends a more lyrical (and surreal) rationalization of cause and effect relationships: from blood sprints enlightenment; from land springs capital; from water springs the codified subdivisions of destiny.

However, the experiential reality of this contested geography asserts a differing view. And don’t be mistaken, this remains a contested land -- the Pueblo Revolt has not ended; it has merely evolved. Indigenous communities, cultures and identities are still interconnected with this landscape long after the Spanish reoccupation, Mexican independence, the Mexican-American War, the Santa Fe Trail, the Civil War, the Santa Fe railway, New Mexico statehood, the Manhattan Project, the invasion of delusional Modern artists and Hollywood elites, and the resulting geographic gentrification.

The descendents of the colonizers may still have their imagined Jesus and their claim to the machinic phylum of their ancestors; yet, if there is one constant to this landscape over the past 400 years, aside from the market and the attempts of outsiders to exert their will through the market, it is the struggle of Indigenous people for continuity and cultural self-determination.

The work in this exhibition is not a means of celebrating the achievements of the city, its original colonizers, the descendents of colonizers who still occupy the region, or the technological and cultural influences introduced and propagated by these people. Instead, the series of work comprise celebrations of Indigenous narratives and the land in which these narratives are embedded and actualized. They are actions of “decolonization” intended to question the ever-increasing omnipotence of the market as it intersects the landscape. The installations engage the re-imagined Indigenous intermediaries of land, culture and community; investigate the metaphysics of an Indigenous machinic phylum; and deconstruct contemporary manifestations of the market within the Santa Fe geography.

It Wasn’t the Dream of Golden Cities 2010