Alan Michelson History Is Present
“My work is very much grounded in the local, in place, and place can be fraught when you’re Indigenous,” says the New York–based artist Alan Michelson.
Michelson, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, has, for more than thirty years, produced evocative, influential works that excavate colonial histories of invasion and eviction. After an early engagement with photography and painting, he gradually shifted to an expanded approach. Video and installation allowed him to abandon a single perspective in favor of unfixed points of view, creating dynamic spaces of visual and auditory immersion. For Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation, his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, he deployed the panoramic form, which he likens to wampum belts—beaded sashes used by Native nations in diplomacy. The show parsed history with references to maps and other archival materials, and to Indigenous geography and philosophy, challenging viewers, via augmented reality, to reconsider the museum’s location, once a Lenape site where tobacco was grown for ceremonial use. For Michelson, history is always present, unfinished business demanding our attention and redress.
This spring, during the city’s shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he spoke with the curator Chrissie Iles about his artistic development, the power of contemporary Indigenous art, and the historical echoes of our publichealth crisis.
I was interested in the way that the colonial gaze became an American gaze that didn’t acknowledge itself as colonial.
Chrissie Iles: In all your work, whether in photography or the moving image, you subvert the camera’s history as an instrument of colonialism by transforming the colonial gaze. What is your relationship to the camera?
: I got a Nikon camera in my early twenties, at that exciting time in (1977) was current. I was always very visual, always drew and painted, and soon became absorbed in that heightened mode of seeing through a viewfinder. I was living in coastal New Hampshire and would go for long walks and take pictures.
