ojo|-|ólǫ́ is an exhibition of recent and newly commissioned work by Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico]) that includes sculpture, textile, collage, and video, activated by moments of performance. Across this work, Riege combines customary Diné practices of weaving, silversmithing, and beading with contemporary cultural forms, exploring Diné cosmology, the history of Euro-American trading posts in and adjacent to the Navajo Nation, and the notion of “authenticity” as a value marker of Indigenous art and craft.
Developed in partnership between the Henry and The Bell Gallery at Brown University, ojo|-|ólǫ́ emerged from Riege’s material research with Navajo collections housed at Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The resulting body of work celebrates the ancestral knowledge and labor contained within Indigenous-made objects, while investigating the role of museums and other institutions in the dissemination and dispossession of knowledge about Indigenous cultures. For his tactile and modular soft sculptures, Riege employs exaggerated scale and combines synthetic and natural materials to playfully question ideas of authenticity and Indigenous artistic production. Processes of making and remaking embody a living practice of exchange that draws together webs of connection across time and space.
The exhibition also includes objects from the Burke collection displayed alongside assorted ephemera from Riege’s own home and studio. The resulting non-hierarchal display blurs lines between past and present, private and public, and real and fake, animating the dynamism and dimensionality of Indigenous cultures and identities. ojo|-|ólǫ́ invites collective reflection on the practices of institutions that have accumulated Indigenous art, while advancing a call for Indigenous cultural resurgence in the present and toward our shared future.
