Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico]) creates large soft sculptures, weavings, performance, and video rooted in cultural memory and invested in questioning the (re)production of Indigeneity. Across his work, Riege combines customary Diné practices with contemporary cultural forms exploring Diné mythology, the history of Euro-American trading posts in 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/Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, ojo|-|ólǫ́ brings together Riege’s work across media in his largest solo exhibition to date. The exhibition is based on Riege’s material research and engagement with the Navajo collections held by Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The resulting new body of work is informed by ancestral knowledge and traditions contained within Indigenous objects, and which aims, in part, to redress practices of cultural dispossession by museums and other institutions. Riege’s work manifests in unexpected materials and exaggerated scale, embracing infidelity to the archive as a modality to trouble the colonial record and the idea of an authentic Native artistry mythologized in the Western imagination.
As an extension of Riege’s collage-based practice and approach to artmaking, the exhibition will include museum collection objects alongside jewelry, regalia, and assorted ephemera from Riege’s own domestic space, as well a selection of his sketches and myriad source imagery. The resulting non-hierarchal display blurs lines between past and present, private and public, and real and fake, animating a story of cultural continuity as a living and dynamic process.
