Sucrement - 2005/7, 2 channel video installation with sugar, variable dimensions.

Please click here to view a MPEG 4 video sample of Sucrement. Sucrement is a two-channel video installation with sound projected onto two walls with a small table and a mound of sugar placed at the center of the room. Scurrying red ants are projected onto the sugar mound. Sucrement was filmed on my family's land in Northern New Mexico. I had carried the idea around with me for a couple of years, but it took on a greater urgency following my mother's death in 2005. It is a ritual of desperation, doomed to fail, yet an effort at combining some sense of traditional Native ideas with contemporary concerns. The video shows me pouring sugar in human form around a red anthill as both an offering and sacrament. The piece is informed by the high diabetes rate among Native Americans. Sucrement is not intended as some “new age” feel-good distraction. Instead, it is a way of conveying a sense of desperation that exists, not only amongst many Indigenous Americans, but within the larger non-native population as well. Much of my work is concerned with how both globalization and capitalism might act as a possible foundation for the development of potential hybrid mythologies and whether these mythologies can become more than merely distractive tools of hegemony and commerce.

Copyright 2008 Ambiguous Art