Woven: The Art of Contemporary Native Basketry
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith / Klamath and Modoc
Farrell-Smith utilizes painting as well as sculptural installations to explore the content in-between Indigenous and western cultural interpretations of aesthetics, symbols, and place. These relationships make transparent violent, beautiful, complicated legacies of claim and connection to bi-cultural identity. Her recent body of work reclaims shifting colonized spaces that utilize pictorial images to build comparison and engage dialogue around concepts of decolonization and Indigenization.
The paintings reference symbols that contemplate the multiplicity of meaning, in emblem, icon, & color. The reference’s aim to grasp at contemporary gaps of Indigenous tribal knowledge due to legacies of cultural genocide, such as loss of language, ceremony and forced displacement from ancestral homelands. Employing both the deconstruction and reconstruction of mark’s and color allows for the processing of meaning and function, while reconstituting knowledge, spirit, and remembrance on a visual plain. At the core this recent body of work explores the realms of duplicity, through examining erasure, defacement, and disruption, that pair and transform into passages of meditative balance and zones-of-refuge.
