Indigenous Futurisms on Ledger, Part II

K Art is pleased to participate in Art Toronto 2022. The Canadian fair commenced via invitation only on October 27th and opened to the public on October 28th. It will run through October 30th, 2022. Following the success of its 2021 edition, which featured late-career artists Luzene Hill, G. Peter Jemison, and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, we will return with a duo exhibition of emerging artists Henry Payer (Ho-Chunk) and Terran Last Gun (Piikani). For my final segment of this two-part series, I've spoken and worked closely with Terran Last Gun regarding his livelihood, process, and ideas.

Terran Last Gun (b. 1989) works primarily with printmaking and drawing. In his work, he visualizes nature, the cosmos, cultural narratives, and recollections of home in reduced geometric aesthetics and vibrant color harmonies. Informed by Blackfoot oral histories, his work magnifies patterns commonly found on painted lodges, a meaningful symbol of the artist's power, survivance, and home. Essentially, Last Gun, with a controlled hand and a newfound palette, continues the ceremonial legacy of tipi painting with earth and sky symbolism but bridges the tradition with a contemporary flair.

For Art Toronto, the Piikani artist continues to work with antique paper, though – much like Henry Payer – it wasn't necessarily the first vehicle on his mind. It is a relatively new medium for the artist, as he was primarily a printmaker in past years. "Once I realized I couldn't utilize or was very limited to working in printmaking shops due to the pandemic, I shifted to working with the ledger sheets. My father is also a plains ledger artist, so I have him to thank for learning more about the history of ledger art and the connection to Indigenous plains artists."

Generational knowledge and community have been critical to Last Gun's core. Growing up in Browning, MT, the Blackfoot capital of the Northern state, he became involved with his Piikani culture and customs, attending powwows and sharing oral histories. Despite working with symbolic imagery, his father is an influential figure in his practice, and he even passed down his first few sheets of the ledger to his son. Now based in Santa Fe for over a decade, Terran still reflects on his upbringing in the Montana landscape. He feels it is his duty to share the authentic Piikani narrative with the contemporary art world.

Linear shapes have proved to be a viable language for eons universally, often reflecting images of nature to understand the world's properties better. Finding root in abstract symbolism profound in Blackfoot painted lodges, Terran fuses these patterns with Western art movements. He recognizes that simple geometry and linework speak louder and reach further than words. Discs and solid color fields dominated the nomadic tribe's tipis and revealed cosmological histories of the Blackfeet's relationship with earth and sky. Last Gun reminds us that these stories are alive and well and challenges us to look beyond structure and into the stars.

He's created a limited series of six drawings on ledger paper exclusively for Art Toronto, experimenting with new color harmonies and larger-scale work. In assembly, a community of abstract lodges is built upon paper dating 1900 and originating from Montana; each depicts neon trapezoids housing varying rippled circles. He's reduced the lodge to its purest elements: shelter and spiritual energy. In parallel to the movement of paper, this traditional Blackfoot home was mutable and was a sacred treasure, for it told to bring good fortune and health. The parallelograms are portals to Last Gun's nostalgia for home, to which we are greeted by the Sun and its rays. His electric and bold use of color on a century-old medium recalls retro-futuristic ideologies of depicting a celestial future in an earlier era.

I came across Terran Last Gun's work over a year now, and I have had the great pleasure of working with him on several projects. Still, the artist continuously surprises me with his drive to bring Blackfeet culture to the forefront. Last Gun is an emerging artist from Santa Fe, NM, and was recently named one of twelve artists to know by Southwest Contemporary. He expects several gallery, museum solo, and group exhibitions in the coming years. His work is in the permanent collections of the Hood Museum of Art, NH; Museum of Fine Arts, TX; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), NM; and many more public and private collections.

For inquiries, please contact contact@thek.art.