Jackson Polys: Manifest Excess
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Still from Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition (2019). image / New Red Order
Abstract
As a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society, Jackson Polys has worked collaboratively to employ a multiplicity of swerving strategies, rather than aim to approach questions around desires for Indigeneity: How to locate the persistence, the limits, and viability of those desires, manifested in recurrent settler colonial determinations and habits? How to ingest what might be seen as inappropriate urges to merge, in order to rechannel those desires into paths for the expansion of Indigenous growth and agency? Through the work of NRO, these questions open into an induction process, implicating and drawing in people of multiple subject positions, with varying proximities to Indigenous experience. As Indigeneity is actively produced as a commodity, what properties are we being made to consume? Polys will examine paths of interdisciplinary work that target aporias formed by desiring Indigeneity — confronting expectations of art's imperative to ingest and overstep, to navigate often conflicting urges toward the decolonial appeal.
Biography
Jackson Polys is a Tlingit multidisciplinary artist, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. He holds an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and is a recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation fellowships and a United States Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order, a public secret society who, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produce video, performance, and installation works that examine and aim to shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. His individual and collaborative works have appeared with the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Art Sonje, Artists Space, Creative Time, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MOMENTA Biennale de l'image, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial of Art, and the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.
