Exhibition

John Feodorov: Assimilations

25 Feb 2021 – 31 Mar 2021

Regular hours

Thursday
10:00 – 17:30
Friday
10:00 – 17:30
Saturday
10:00 – 17:30
Tuesday
10:00 – 17:30
Wednesday
10:00 – 17:30

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CUE Art Foundation is pleased to present Assimilations, a solo exhibition by John Feodorov, curated by Ruba Katrib.

About

Drawing upon his experience growing up half-Navajo (Diné) and half-white in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Feodorov’s multimedia installation, paintings, and prints explore how identity and memory are shaped amidst the violent pressures of cultural assimilation and the legacy of settler colonialism in the United States. 

In the front gallery, Feodorov’s installation, How I Learned To Be A Christ-jun, displays Pentecostal and Jehovah’s Witness hymn books and pages along with a New Testament Bible translated into the Navajo language in an altar-like space. Manipulated recordings play a Christian congregation singing hymns combined with looped audio of the artist’s mother and grandfather singing traditional Navajo songs. In the main gallery, large paintings combine the artist’s family photographs and original photographs, pages from Pentacostal hymn books, symbols of Americana, industrial imagery, Google satellite maps, and natural landscapes with bold fields of textured paint. Combining explorations of representation and legibility with vivid and joyful mark-making, the artist reflects on the violence of white settler culture and federal policies towards Native communities, while at the same time honoring the history, stories, and sacred significance of his family homestead and traditions. The print series, Collectibles, layers the weave of a Navajo rug and stereotypical advertising copy that commodifies Indigenous cultures over his own obscured family photographs, highlighting the media’s appropriation and othering of Indigenous people along with corresponding assumptions about their identity and spirituality. 

Throughout the exhibition, the artist reflects on the history of coerced Navajo conversion to Pentecostalism in the 20th century in order to explore the lasting loss and duality that those forced to abandon the cultural and spiritual traditions of their ancestors experience in the present. Feordorov’s work explores the fragmentation of identity and search for belonging among urban-born Indigenous communities caused by the United States’ history of settler colonialism. In the exhibition catalogue, Ruba Katrib writes: “Throughout Feodorov’s work, a range of defining institutions converge and are at odds. These include formal and informal institutions of culture, of nation, of faith, and of belonging. It is actually the impossibilities, as well as the traumas, of reconciliation that needle and probe the works in his exhibition, Assimilations.”

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