Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona Exhibition: Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.): Màatakuyma

Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona Exhibition: Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.): Màatakuyma

Exhibition Dates: November 30, 2023 – January 27, 2024

Opening reception with the artist Saturday December 2, 2024, 7:00 to 10:00 P.M. at the Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona LLC, 330 S. Convent Ave., Tucson 85701

“Màatakuyma, —Now it is becoming clearer to me.
— Duwawisioma

Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona LLC. is pleased to announce the exhibition Màatakuyma by legendary Hopi photographer and filmmaker Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.). Duwawisioma (b. 1951) continues a lifelong quest to understand “existence” and “being” in terms of Hopi ancestral traditions in the modern world. In this exhibition he focuses on the universal ideas engendered in the Hopi lunar agricultural cycle, combining cosmology, the emergence of the Hopi, animating the personalities of place, and elements of nature, death that leads to regeneration, and cycles of creation and destruction.

Duwawisioma grew up in Hotevilla, Arizona, on the Hopi Third Mesa. He attended the Horace Mann School in New York City in his teens and then studied English literature and photography at Princeton University. Outside of his schooling he has always lived in Hotevilla, where he has worked with the community youth and elders to record Hopi cultural history and has worked in many other capacities in the civic life of the Hopi and the religious life of his clan and community. Since 1981 he has been making groundbreaking movies and videos such as Hoplit (1982) and Itam Hakim Hoplit (1984) made in the Hopi language and selected for the National Film Archives in 2023, Ritual Clowns (1988) receiving the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award, Imagining Indians (1992), and Paatuwaqatsi – Water, Land and Life (2007). During the last 32 years, the Andrew Smith Gallery has hosted half a dozen exhibitions of Duwawisioma’s work: Recent Works (1991), Victor Masayesva Jr. (1993), Tumuola (1996), Nuclear Reservations (1998) and Drought (2006).

The Hopis’ survival has always depended on prayers for favorable weather conditions. For thousands of years the Anasazi and later the Hopi have inhabited a region of high, arid mesas where there is little rainfall. No rivers or streams flow through the territory, though a few permanent springs provide the people with drinking water. Over time, the Hopi developed their own farming systems and crops particularly suited to their specific environment. Integral to this is the respect and reverence for nature and its elements and ceremonies that promote this. Duwawisioma’s images describe the animated and difficult relationships man has with the natural world. Relationships with places of emergence and spirits, the personalities of various elements of nature, the heat and freezing must all be considered; along with the personalities of specific places, such as places where there might be salt, water, deer, rattlesnakes, or the sacred Sipapuni in the Grand Canyon from where the Hopi emerged.

The exhibition includes the 12-print narrative Natwani. This series imagines the Hopi lunar agricultural calendar: when there has been moisture, the timing and planting and harvesting of corn and other crops, the skill of the farmer, and the elements of weather mixed in with a cycle of social activities, marriage, and ceremonial activities.

Corn is the dietary and spiritual base of Hopi life, and a skilled farmer understands this through the activities and rituals associated with the Hopi lunar calendar. The lunar cycles begin with moisture, then cleansing and then there are cycles of wind, planting, and harvest (including marriage). Nature can be generous and beneficial providing germination, new life, and growth but it can also cause drought, pestilence, and plagues of insects.

In the series Tuuviki (mask), Duwawisioma creates images intimating and sketching the personalities and presences that he imagined whether in the Grand Canyon or in a drop of rain. This follows the tradition of katsina representation that emerged from the Hopi migrations. Encountering special places, events, spirits, as well as environmental deprivations (drought, famine, etc.), these circumstances were encapsulated in the katsina and welcomed into the community.

In the diptych Poquangt (Pookongt-twins Poqaung and Paloongaw-Echo) Masayesva has stacked iPhone portraits like twin communications towers to convey his concept of “twinness”, symmetry, balance, conflict, order, chaos, and harmony.

In the short video Tuuvutsi, he uses the photograph Tiinqaveh, which shows a village created from 35-millimeter slides and set in a cornfield, that is struck by an earthquake.
There are a handful of older portraits made in Australia, Ecuador, and Hopi including a self-portrait of the artist reminding the viewer of their otherness in everyday life.

As is part of Duwawisioma’s looking back he has re-harvested some of his earlier images, altering the context from earlier narratives. In the codex Navoti he combines an earlier 4-part narrative series Tuwapongya where he asked in this series in 1993, “We are given the ideal situation with the earth as an altar. The question is, how do you conduct yourself here?” Now Duwawisioma presents this as the beginning or end of an accordion-style codex where he has added menacing images from Kikmongwi’s Rain Songs (1979-1982) of floods, drought, disease, and the Red Owl (1993). Mounted back-to-back accordion style the new sequences go from positive to negative and negative to positive, oppositional forces related to each other. Being clear is knowing less and understanding more.

The exhibition began with the remembrance of an uncle’s warning that not everything is what it appears to be, masked.

Duwawisioma creates digital collages from an amalgamation of stories, symbols, natural objects, and actual places. He brings to this body of work insights from the fields of biology, ecology, humanity, history, and planetary energy, along with concepts and traditions from the Hopi people. Rooted in Hopi cosmology, Duwawisioma explores an environmental and ontological reality meaningful to all people.

He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. He has been a guest artist and artist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Banff Center for the Arts, Banff; Yamagata International Film Festival, Japan and Imagine Native, Toronto.

Duwawisioma’s feature films and short videos have been widely viewed, including at the Native American Film and Video Festival, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Long Beach Museum of Art, California; the World Wide Video Festival, The Hague; the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York; the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the San Francisco Art Institute; and the Festival CineVideo de las Primeras Naciones Abya-Yala, Ecuador.

Hours: Monday – Friday 10-4 and Saturday 12-5

Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona
330 S. Convent Ave., Tucson, AZ 85701

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