'What You Left Me: Creating Dad Through Artifact'

"What You Left Me: Creating Dad Through Artifact" is the newest exhibit from Noelle Garcia appearing through Jan. 7, 2011, at the Winchester Cultural Center Gallery. Noelle Garcia forgoes painting to create an anthropological museum display of artifacts commemorating her Native American father's tragic life.
Garcia explores identity and loss through an exhibition-as-archive about her father, an estranged member of the Klamath tribe convicted of murder at the age of 25. The installation presents documents, photos and objects from her now-deceased father's life in a format that borrows from museum display practices and Native American art collections.
"Although I never had much of a chance to know my father I strive to honor him. My feelings toward my father are conflicted . . . Through the process of art making I research him. I interrogate each photograph and through this process I have a relationship with him," says Garcia, who was separated from her tribal lands as a child. As an adult and an artist, she attempts to reconstruct the lost histories of her father and her Native American culture.
In earlier bodies of work, the artist has used family photographs as source material for paintings and drawings. Now, the source material becomes the art: photographs, a birth certificate, prison records, articles of clothing. Displayed as museum "artifacts", these precious objects investigate and frame her father's life and her non-traditional Native American upbringing.
One of the painters in the recent Zap public art project, Noelle Garcia was born in Reno, Nevada in 1984 and raised on the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. Garcia received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, and she is currently a candidate in the Department of Art's Master of Fine Arts Program at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The artist is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Klamath Tribes.

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• What
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• Me:
• Creating
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• Cultural
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• Vegas
• Nevada
• Clark
• County
• death
• artifact

[YosemiteNative1]

Interesting !