This solo exhibition by artist Emily Arthur examines connections between seemingly unrelated events, past and present, to make visible the land as a living matter that holds a story. This selection of work, which includes artist’s books, original prints and small, cast bronze objects, reflects contemporary legal struggles to protect wildlife from land development and modern-day arguments to delist threatened bird species. These struggles echo of nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny whereby the forced removal of Indigenous peoples was carried out through government policies. Arthur writes, “I see nature as an interdependent living force, rather than as the backdrop for human events. Displacement, loss and a concern for the environment are a result of my personal experience. The Cherokee and European descent of my family offers a multilayered perspective embodied in my work.”
Printmaking is typically used to create multiple images, and historically these multiples have been used for both subjugation and as agents for change. Arthur’s printmaking practice, which encompasses etching, woodcut, monoprint, and screenprint, examines the complex relationship of people and the land, a dialogue that is fraught and that continues across generations. She often works with historians, ornithologists, mycologists, Indigenous scholars, and poets who integrate narratives between art, history, and natural science. Nancy Marie Mithlo, an Indigenous scholar of race and representation at The University of California, Los Angeles, writes in Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums (forthcoming from The University of Arizona Press) that Arthur’s work “links land and people in an impulse that defines the hallmark of her artistic practice…Fragmented life histories are captured and lightly held for a moment, a firefly in Arthur’s cupped hands, for us to examine, to gaze upon, and to wonder anew at their very existence, given the impossible odds.”
