Eric-Paul Riege brings Art21 into the studio
Carina Martinez for Art21’s In the Studio talks with Eric-Paul Riege on the role and interconnectivity of place, time, materiality, storytelling, and performance in his practice.
Speaking to the question of how place informs his practice, Eric-Paul Riege describes his home and studio in Gallup, New Mexico, on the same block he’s lived throughout his life within the area of his mother’s ancestral home at the border of the Navajo reservation. He explains ways he experiences continuity as part of generations of Diné weavers, saying “My hands know what they’re doing before my brain does because of that connection to family and to the land.”
Throughout the interview, material animacy is drawn out in different ways. For example, he says, “Each material either comes with or is impressed upon with marks that are indicative of their journey, whether that’s from the hands that manufactured the yarn or beads that I work into the artworks, to the run of an exhibition where the audience members are touching and molecularly altering the surfaces.” He later shares that when creating an artwork, he sees it “as a self-actualizing thing that is limitless in its potential to change, to be adorned and unadorned in perpetuity.”
Martinez asks how Riege’s sensitivity to materials relates to storytelling over time, to which Riege answers by telling a story: “My grandmother once told me that jewelry holds on to memory because of how we wear it: earrings are close to your ears, so they’re listening with you; a necklace is close to your heart, so it’s feeling with you; rings and bracelets are close to your hands, so they’re touching with you.” He further speaks about how, like jewelry, his artworks hold memories of their materiality, the time he’s been with them, and the future to come. To exemplify this, Martinez speaks of the series jaatłoh4Ye’iitsoh (2020–21), which is inspired by his grandmother’s stories of the monstrous gods who came before humans, which Riege imagines wore proportionately sized jewelry.
Softness is a shared quality and value. Whether working with synthetic or organic materials, Riege mimics where we find comfort in our daily lives, from clothing to beds. He expands this by weaving humor into his practice: “There’s also something kind of campy and queer about a weaving comb made from stuffed animals: there’s a kitschy silliness in my work that maybe people don’t see if they don’t know me personally. I like laughing at the fact that I pretty much make pillows for a living.” He also shares how he likes to play with constructions of authenticity and value as it relates to soft materials, which he says can be considered less-than, in both the art world and the industry of Indigenous objects.
Martinez invites Riege to share ways that he resists colonial economies and representations of “Native American art.” He draws parallels with how trading post and pawn shop sellers, often non-Native, dictate weaving designs in similar ways that gallerists and dealers behave as tastemakers for Native American contemporary art. In his own work, he plays with, questions, and challenges these practices of what he calls “anthropological flattening” of “Native” art. One way of doing this is through personal experiences engaging with museum collections of Indigenous art. For example, spending time with a broken Navajo weaving comb by a once-known maker inspired many ideas for his solo exhibition at the Bell Gallery.
When asked about his performance practice and how it relates to his ways of working with space, Riege reflects on performativity as a teen through fashion and how his professor and mentor Szu-Han Ho showed how the body can be used for art. Durational “weaving dances” within his installations became a way to honor and affirm the animacy of his materials and artworks. He explained how his installations remain spatially intimate in part to create scenarios in which visitors’ physical interaction with his works becomes likely.Closing the interview on the topic of inheritance and legacy, Riege says he is “a student to the material forever, in the same way that [he is] a lifelong student to the Navajo language.” He reflects on the Navajo word Hólǫ́, meaning “to exist” or “to be”, and how this is incorporated and expanded in his exhibitions. He says, in thinking “about what has been passed down to me and how I can pass this down”, he created Hólǫ́ as a character that he considers as a son born from the womb of his mind, who first appeared in his solo exhibition, Hólǫ́—it xistz at ICA, Miami, in 2019. More recently, in ojo|-|ólǫ́ at the Bell Gallery, Riege describes Hólǫ́ as “a collaborator, an alter ego, and persona, this figure that I create for and alongside.”