My Home Is Where my Tipi Sits

 
 

My Home Is Where my Tipi Sits, 2011

Series of 5 archival pigment prints, 57 x 72 inches each

Edition of 4

The series My Home is Where My Tipi Sits creates gridded taxonomies of five idiosyncratic elements of Crow Reservation life: brightly colored government houses, broken-down “rez” cars, sweat lodges, signs, and churches. In lush, large-scale color photographs, the series provocatively combines a title based on the poetic phrase of a Crow chief responsible for negotiating the borders of the tribe’s territory with mundane and self-made visual attributes of daily life. Referencing the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher’s extensive series of photographic inventories of industrial buildings and structures, arranged in grids to suggest typologies of “families of objects,” Red Star honors this modern conceptualist approach while simultaneously complicating the formalist bent of the grid format.

The Crow were never adequately compensated for the loss of their lands throughout the nineteenth century, as the U.S. government offered them the equivalent of five cents per acre in addition to providing sub-standard houses. The grids are indices of contemporary Native life, an unsettling reference to class and the reality of life in reservation towns. Red Star’s series subverts the monumentality of the Bechers’ serial project, defiantly asserting an anti-architectural agency, and creates a family of objects based on information that privileges Native epistemologies, a factor that reverses the typical flow of information toward a Western audience. Red Star’s conceptual photographic works conjure the topographies of the modern-day Crow Reservation in order to subvert historical tendencies to classify Native lifeways into delimiting ethnographic categories.

— Text from Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, Newark Museum exhibition catalogue, 2019, Nadiah Rivera Fellah and Tricia Laughlin Bloom