3-D Installation and Mixed Media Works
How I Learned To Be A Christ-Jun – 2020-21. Installation view.
Hymn books, Navajo bible, 24 decoupaged hymns on gold wooden plaques, two-channel audio. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the CUE Foundation Art Gallery. NY, NY.
As a teenager having grown up as a Christian, I secretly worried what it meant to take on the religion of the colonizer, of the enemy. My uneasiness grew, leading me to finally split with Christianity in my early 20’s. Yet, just as I believe that my mother was not able to fully purge Navajo sacred traditions from her identity, I knew that, like it or not, Christianity would always be a part of who I am. In my 20’s, it troubled me that I was a spawn of forced assimilation and the outcome of federal termination policy.
This installation is meant to be exhibited in a small space. Manipulated audio of a Christian (Jehovah’s Witness) congregation singing hymns, combined with audio of my mother and grandfather singing several traditional Navajo songs, play quietly in a continuous loop. Two old hymn books (one Pentecostal and the other JW), as well as a New Testament Bible translated into the Navajo language, are displayed on a pedestal in the center of the front gallery. 24 gold-painted wood plaques with hymns from the hymn books hang on a wall. Visitors are invited to peruse the lyrics of these hymns while listening to the loop playing in the background.
"In Advance of… Another Long Walk" - 2019. Wood, acrylic, comfort insole, plastic barbed wire, and collage.
Shrine For Your New God – 2014, mixed media kinetic installation with video, variable dimensions.
Everyone needs a new god now and then, either as a matter of choice, because of forced conversion and assimilation, or just because the old one has begun to seem a bit stale.
There have been plenty of past attempts at combining elements of various world religions into one happy hybrid; taking the most warm and fuzzy elements of numerous cultural traditions. Theosophy and the New Age come to mind. Then some Savonarola character comes along and spoils the party, throwing everything upon a penitent bonfire. While I am no Savonarola, I do hope my art stirs up some intellectual embers before it too ends up as ashes floating in the proverbial Florentine breeze.
The installation was part of the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle WA, curated by Wendy Red Star.
Domi-Nature - 2013-15. Mixed media installation with single-channel video loop. Dimensions variable. Installation view from the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner WA.
Domi-Nature is comprised of 12 white-washed Teddy Bears kneeling and praying silently before a projection of the three smoke-stacks from the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired powerplant located on the Navajo reservation. The bears genuflect as if before a vision from heaven. This is an updated version to an earlier installation I created in 2001, just before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Since then, this piece has taken on a more serious and tragic association for me, particularly with recent environmental tragedies such as the BP Oil Spill and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Japan.
Genies - 2011. 12 ceramic heads submerged in mason jars filled with motor oil with light fixture. 10" x 24" x 10". Installation view at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, NM.
Ambiguity - 2009. 12 flattened teddy bears, stuffing, bees wax, contact cement, cardboard and wire. Variable dimensions (since destroyed). Installation view at the South Seattle Community College Art Gallery. Dimensions variable. Now destroyed.
The idea for “Ambiguity” popped into my head while driving on the freeway. I suddenly burst out laughing. However, I later began to realize just how serious a work it actually is.
The piece addresses our complex relationship with Nature and the conflicting sensations many of us feel in its presence. For many in our culture, there is a pervading feeling of disconnection from Nature, causing some to hark back to an imagined pre-industrial paradise--an Eden before the Fall. Certainly, this yearning for re-connection has been a driving force behind much of Western art and thought since Plato.
The large Teddy Bear (spirit, god, ruler?) is constructed from the stuffing of the 12 teddy bears spread upon the floor beneath. It is suspended in a corner gazing down upon the viewer. Bees wax imbues each bear with the faint scent of honey.
Oracle - 2010-2018. Fur, aluminum, speakers, wire, choke chain, cone, acrylic and gesso. 40" x 24" x 8". Installation view.
Temple - 2005-14, 12 animal statuettes, lights, astroturf, offering cups, lawn chair, flip flops, fake flowers, single-channel video and audio. Dimensions variable.
Temple: Statement
As a teenager raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, I was somewhat embarrassed by the rather saccharine illustrations of the anticipated future earthly paradise promoted within JW literature. Paradise was rendered with a freshly mowed lawn, manicured bushes, and lions and tigers acting as headrests for middleclass-looking families with conservative haircuts -- God’s “Chosen People”. This paradise would follow Jehovah’s justifiable destruction of all non-Jehovah’s Witnesses, with very few exceptions.
With Temple, I wanted to play with fantasies of spiritual paradise, whether based in heaven or here on Earth. The materials I have chosen are recognizable to most American suburban households: a lawn chair, animal statuettes, and fake grass. The nude figures in the video welcome the viewer with statements regularly encountered by consumers in a department store: “How may I help you today?” and “Are you finding everything alright?”
While I am no longer associated with any religion or ideology, I am still interested in whether humanity’s continued yearning for connection and meaning (what Freud called an “Oceanic Feeling”) begs for an updated manifestation. Perhaps what is needed is a new “spiritual” iconography that utilizes everyday manufactured items and materials to merge the concepts of sacred and profane rather than segregate them. Of course this idea is not original. For example, throughout the U.S., impromptu shrines of flowers and teddy bears spring up after the death of a child, relative or even a celebrity. In numerous cultures, shrines to the dead frequently incorporate “kitsch” items to memorialize the departed. Cheap plastic gods, saints and idols can also be found in markets and dollar stores around the globe. Any material can potentially be transformed into a “sacred object”, a kind of spiritual recontextualization. With Temple, my goal was to imbue significance into normally mundane objects through the creation of a secular/sacred meditative space.
The Office $haman - 2000-05
Various mixed media “artifacts” on display, performance, and video. Dimensions variable.
The Office $haman was originally conceived in 2000 as an exhibition of paraphernalia for a pseudo-business venture. It was a direct response to having lived in Santa Fe N.M. for five years, surrounded by the phenomena of New Age cultural/spiritual appropriation and capitalism. It was later turned into a performance piece for the PBS series, Art:21. In 2005, after receiving a lot of interest in the piece, I decided to create a mock info-mercial to accompany the exhibit as a looped video. I originally intended to send the DVD and promotional materials to various corporate human resource departments, though this idea never came to fruition. An excerpt of the video is on the Video page.
Dear Mr./Ms. Corporate Visionary,
You’ve seen it before, an employee straggles in late, perhaps a little disheveled, unshaven, …or worse. Maybe your company has previously reprimanded this employee about their tardiness and lack of motivation. Will this behavior spread to your other employees like a medieval plague? Or perhaps you have an employee who is a habitual gossiper. Are they the team player your company needs and deserves?
Chances are the problem isn’t that you hired bad employees, but that there is some other malevolent influence at work. Sure, you could terminate them, but your costly investment would go up in smoke and there is certainly no guarantee the next employee will turn out any better. The Office $haman® has a better solution. More than half the globe, including many of your clients and customers, believes in evil spirits! I’m not talking about the ghouls and goblins that ring your doorbell on Halloween and yell “trick or treat!” No, this is a much more serious threat. Just as spirits dwell within forests, caves and mountaintops, ghastly forces are lurking within your company’s walls, cubicles and break rooms. An employee may become an unwilling host to demonic forces, putting your company’s profits at instant risk. Outsourcing only adds to the problem since even more strange and damaging spirits are known to dwell within exotic countries such as India, China and Mexico. These evil anti-Capitalist spirits must be eliminated!
That’s where the Office $haman® comes in! For a modest fee, The Office $haman® will perform a magical and efficient shamanistic ritual that will harmonize your employee’s life goals with those of your corporation, all in just a few minutes! As you know, managing the future requires innovation and strategic planning. Contact The Office $haman® today to guarantee a workplace free from malevolent spirit forces intent on seeing your business and our Capitalistic Dream fail!
Cordially,
The Office $haman®
Unherd - 2008
Office cubicles, painted saw horses, rotisserie motors, fluorescent light fixtures, cow moo toys, photo frames, two-channel video and motion sensor. Dimensions variable.
Essay excerpt from the exhibition booklet for, "Ruminations and Pontifications"
"As viewers cross the threshold into the Sheehan Gallery, they are greeted by a cacophony of melancholic, mechanical mooing.
John Feodorov's most recent installation, Unherd, juxtaposes recurring themes: nature, spirituality, landscape, and the office. The office and the factory farm coalesce in an environment that is eerie, maudlin, and yet somehow still humorous. Corralled in office-like cubicles, spindly, wooden, mock-cow forms watch images of grass in which they will never gambol. The cows, painted in traditional Navajo colors (black, white, blue, and yellow), reference Feodorov's Navajo heritage, adding a further dimension to the work. The drone of bovine sounds within the cubicle pasture places the cows, and the implied office worker, in an inescapable Sisyphusian task, never completed or satisfying. Written with obsessive repetition on the cubicle walls, the phrase 'You Are Here,' makes viewers aware of the sequestered spaces within their own lives where they may feel permanently stuck. The herding into small confined spaces thus becomes linked with processes of corporatization and colonialism. The rotating novelty noise-making devices that give voice to Feodorov's creatures will eventually lose their capacity for sound. The complex symbolism of this inevitable silence indicates the short lives of factory farm cows, the lost voices of displaced peoples, and the endless futility of pushing paper from cubicle to cubicle."
Kristen Hutchinson - Professor of Visual Culture, Whitman College.
4 Sacred Spaces - 2007-8, file cabinet, video monitors, dvd players, headphones, pebbles, straw, leaves, and sand. Dimensions variable.
4 Sacred Spaces: Statement
When I was a child, I was taught that four sacred mountains define the border of my people’s traditional Diné homeland, and that its geography is infused with mythical significance. For example, the mountain chain near my family’s homestead is the solidified voice of Changing Woman, or that the lava bed next to interstate 40 near Grants N.M. is the coagulated blood of a giant slain by one of the Hero Twins. The landscape still provides context and meaning for the Diné people.
4 Sacred Spaces explores how myths are intrinsically tied to landscape and how the significance of a specific geography decreases with the increased mobility of populations, whether voluntary or not. I am also interested in how sites are imbued with meaning within contemporary urban environments. While parks, museums and other cultural institutions may accomplish this, 4 Sacred Spaces explores how the everyday workplace might also be recognized as a potential sacred space.