Artist Talk With Postcommodity

CentralTrak is pleased to present an artist talk featuring artists’ collective Postcommodity. Members Kade Twist and Nathan Young will give insight to their current CentralTrak exhibition Gallup Motel Butchering. Postcommodity is presenting a particular kind of collision when a cultural process may seem irrational or disturbing to an outsider. However in pragmatic indigenous terms, this tradition of sourcing food/meat acknowledges the interconnectedness of land, culture and community. Gallup Motel Butchering: On exhibition at CentralTrak is the four-channel video installation, Gallup Motel Butchering by artists' collective Postcommodity. The video installation features a Navajo woman using a motel in Gallup, New Mexico as a temporary space to butcher a sheep that she will prepare for a family feast. The exhibition examines the contested space of tribal homeland, tradition, globalism, commerce, cultural continuity and cross-cultural opinion. This motel scenario throws a kink into our romantic notions of visiting and observing Native American peoples. The setting provides a disruption, muddling past and present. The motel in question was constructed on the traditional homelands of the Navajo people. Said hotel gives tourists familiar comforts - acting as a touchstone perhaps, while they are observe cultural traditions that are unfamiliar. As an audience to this video installation, we are once again in the role of the tourist/colonizer viewing cultural tradition seemingly out-of-context against the assumptions of the Western imagination. Bio: Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, Kade L. Twist and Nathan Young. Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere. Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the Telluride Institute (2007), American Composers Forum (2008), Arizona Commission on the Arts (2009), Elly Kay Fund (2010), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014). In 2011 the collective’s work was featured in “Close Encounters,” an international Indigenous exhibition exhibited in multiple venues throughout the city of Winnipeg, CA; Contour the 5th Biennial of the Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, CA; “Half Life: Patterns of Change,” Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM; “The Night is Filled With the Harmonics of Suburban Dreams,” Lawrence Art Center, Lawrence, KS; “Here,” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum; 18th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia; Adelaide International in Adelaide, Australia; and Time Lapse, Site Santa Fe, in Santa F