LECTURE

What are the stakes of artistic research right now? Can art usher in alternate ways of thinking in a world in which discourse is polarizing; advanced technologies drive knowledge production, and scientific research is weaponized? How can art’s open-ended paradigms shift the frameworks through which we approach the ethical, political, complexities of the current moment?

How do artists de-naturalize engrained ways of looking and thinking? How can art hold space for the spectrum of ways of knowing and being in the world? How do art’s multi-sensorial ways of being in the world support the decolonization, re-Indigenization, and de-ableization of knowledge paradigms? Drawing on lines of thinking from her recent book Reclaiming Artistic Research, Lucy Cotter will foreground artists’ ability and shared desire to reimagine and redefine what we call knowledge, highlighting how art contributes to creating new paradigms in today’s world.

SCREENING

Screening of Christine Howard Sandoval, Niniwas, To Belong Here

2023, HD 4K Video, 12:25 mins

Filmed with a wearable camera, artist Christine Howard Sandoval’s film Niniwas, To Belong Here documents her passage across the grounds of Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, commonly known as Mission Soledad, a Spanish mission located in Soledad, California. Surveillance imagery is used to slowly scan the surface of the land, cultural objects on display, and the adobe ruin of the original architecture of the historic mission turned museum. It is one of the 21 former missions of California that now function as museums, none of which explicitly acknowledge their role in the state's colonial history.

The museum site is re-examined through Howard Sandoval's personal history, as the artist's direct ancestors were some of the first Indigenous captives in the mission in the mid 1700's. Imposing self-made drawings of the absent architecture of the buildings where her ancestors lived, her work contains additional historic documents and images, as well as the artist’s documentation of her 4th grade mission project which was common to California public school curriculum until 2017, allowing little or no room to acknowledge history from an Indigenous perspective.

Artist’s Bio:

Christine Howard Sandoval is a multidisciplinary artist who questions the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation, where what is held in the land and what is held within state-sponsored archives negotiate shared spaces of meaning.

Howard Sandoval's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY), amongst others.

Howard Sandoval is represented in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the private research collection of Indigenous art at Forge Projects (NY), the San Jose Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and is represented by parrasch heijnen (LA). She currently lives in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). Howard Sandoval is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nationin Bakersfield, CA.

Artists' Workshop, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, 15 January 2025

How does oral knowledge show up in contemporary art? How do art’s many media enable artists to attend to orality, embodied language, and oral forms of knowledge? How does a voice that comes through the body land differently on a page or a video screen than a thought that comes from rational consciousness? How can artists work against post-Enlightenment knowledge hierarchies that prioritize academic modes? How can art embrace the body as a site of language? Can artistic research engage orality as a register of knowing and unknowing the world? How might oral knowledge engage with complex embodied experience and create spaces for access? What can be learned from poetry and song, and how can artists use art’s ways of engaging to decolonize, re-Indigenize, and de-ableize knowledge?

In the workshop, Lucy Cotter will draw on her work-in-progress on embodied language, alongside the work of several other (multidisciplinary) artists as a prompt for collective discussion on these questions. The participating artists are invited to consider their own work through this paradigm and share insights from the perspective of their own practices. This workshop is intended for artists who directly engage with oral forms and knowledge, as well as for those for whom it seems outside of their current realms of thinking. It will offer reflections relevant to artists doing studio work, performance, socially engaged practice, and advanced technologies, seeking to generate and nourish new creative possibilities.