Biography
X, M.Arch, MFA is an Indigenous futurist, multidisciplinary artist and architect specializing in land, architectural, and new media installation. His work illuminates the liminal space between the ancestral plane and our accelerating post-human world.
X is a 3Arts Award Winner, a 2020 New City Top 50 Artist and the first Native American contributor to the Chicago Architecture Biennial. His work is exhibited and collected internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Ars Electronica, and the MCA Chicago. In 2020, X was commissioned by the U.S. State Department as lead artist of The American Arts Incubator Brazil, where he traveled to Brazil and conducted workshops culminating in a virtual reality exhibition, entitled PORTAL.
X, received a Bachelors of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado, a Masters of Architecture from the University of Southern California, and a Masters of Fine Arts Studio in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an enrolled citizen of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana (Koasati) and Indigenous CHamoru from the Island of Guam (Hacha'Maori).
Artist Statement
'The trajectory of my practice is an exploration of the human interface between our built environment, technology, history, futurity, our own self-relevance, and how we navigate this relationship to construct our notions of order. As an Indigenous Futurist, I believe that art can transcend representation and become something sacred that embodies life itself. I believe that through a multiplicity of creation and being, our knowledge can be embedded into the landscape providing access for future generations of prosperity. My work directly engages the notions of a post-human world, but actualizes to activate the possibility of our own prosperity, by painting our self-constructed limitations and deconstructing them.
Iām adamant that my artistic work and the principles that guide it break through the imposed tropes that bar Indigenous peoples from being full participants in the world we live in. The past tense has been forcibly injected, through colonial mechanisms, into our life-ways, and I seek to end the perpetuation of that model. Indigenous Futurism, to me is both a weapon and armor against ignorant attempts to distort and distill Indigenous contributions to society unto the discourses of archaeology or anthropology. When all institutions view Indigenous creative production as art instead of artifact, and assign authorship instead of anonymity, then the ripples will be felt.
For me, the use of new media and emerging technology in my practice is a product of necessity - out of a need for me to challenge preconceived notions of what art is, and contribute to what it can be and do going forward. I see the blurry intersection of the physical and digital world as an opportunity to hack the divisions that limit us and create portals of embedded truths. There are perspectives we can only ascertain if we bend the world to reveal them, or allow ourselves to zoom out, if only for a brief moment. Our acceleration towards a post-human world is due to our own negligence and our own collective incapacity to heal the scars we have introduced and continue to introduce to this planet. If we can agree that technological pursuit renders this negligence, then my work is the superimposition of this human-made technology mined from earth and projected back onto itself. Through this process, we can better understand what we are doing and recognize that we are now at our last threshold to shift our post-human trajectory.ā