Shadowy Evidence, 2024/2025
Pigment print on matte paper
Slemmons collection
On April 27, 2024, I picked up Rod Slemmons’s archive of photographs from Jan Tichy’s studio at Mana Contemporary. It came in well-worn tan archive boxes—three large and one small. The boxes contained 468 historical photographs of Native Americans. They were mixed and scattered without reference material, labels, or any apparent organization. The photographs of Edward Curtis and Frank Matsura dominated the archive, but other ethnographic and candid photos were mixed among the romanticized images.
I do not know Mr. Slemmons. I am now in conversation with him and his visual research on Native history created by the camera. Native personhood aggregated from negative imprints, surviving incoherently. I pulled the images out and set them on several tables, bringing collections together on a wall. I sat with them for months, and they became ghosts that lived with me. We couldn’t always be together, and I would routinely need to put them away to focus freely, decontextualized from history.
Two of the images held enough of the emotions of rigidity and formality to break open the structures of assimilation that I understood. While keeping the tension of this breaking, I wanted to give the ghosts privacy. Charcoal from a gathering spot on a Suquamish beach veiled these ghosts enough to reveal them here.
Chicago holds its part—a stage drawn flat with ruler and pencil. This conversation triangulates me between what I know and what I see in the plans for a mapped inheritance.
Raised on the Chehalis Reservation in Washington State, Selena Kearney uses photography as a tool to be of service to her community and as a vehicle for artistic expression. Her work includes portraiture and documentary practice as well as constructed conceptual works. Selena creates images that are rooted in a sense of place and culture. She holds a Certificate of Fine Art Photography from The Photographic Center Northwest and is a candidate for a Bachelors of Liberal Arts from Evergreen State College. Selena is the skipper for the elder’s canoe from Suquamish, Spirit of the Raven, and works and lives in Seattle Washington.