WILL WILSON'S COLLODION PRINTS AT PHOTO LA 2013
As an indigenous artist working in the 21st century, employing media that range from

historical photographic processes to the randomization and projection of complex visual

systems within virtual environments, I am impatient with the way that American culture

remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between

Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930

when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced his magisterial opus The North

American Indian. For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in

Curtis photos. Other Native artists have produced photographic responses to Curtis’s

oeuvre, usually using humor as a catalyst to melt the lacquered romanticism of these

stereotypical portraits. I seek to do something different. I intend to resume the

documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st-century indigenous, transcustomary,

cultural practitioner. I want to supplant Curtis’s settler gaze and the

remarkable body of ethnographic material he compiled with a contemporary vision of

Native North America. Will Wilson 2012

Contact: Eileen Braziel Art Advisors 505.699.4914 http://WWW.EILEENBRAZIEL.COM