ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Idyllwild Arts Foundation and the Native American Arts Center presents Cheyenne Randall: Paste, Present, Future. The public art installation features four site-specific murals by artist, Cheyenne Randall (Cheyenne River Sioux, b. 1978), whose interdisciplinary practice investigates iconographic and historic photographs, blending imagery of celebrities, depictions of Indigenous people by non-native individuals including Edward Curtis and Roland Reed, and landscape, with tattoo elements, text, and collage, creating a pastiche of imagery that questions identity, constructed representation, and mimetic meaning and semiotics.
Working in digital photography, Photoshop, paint, and wheat paste installation, Randall investigates appropriation – layering tattoos onto celebrities, historic figures, redressing and interrogating material and popular culture, image ownership in his ShoppedTattoos and Hollywoodnt series. The artist also creates landscape collages in his Mergers and Acquisitions series, analyzing land, land ownership, and development; creating often surreal and juxtaposed imagery; decolonizing and defetishizing landscape in the canon of art history.
“I vandalize pop culture and experiment with tattoo design and placement in my work,” said Randall. “I am a self-taught artist, raised outside of my tribal lands. My intent with this installation is to ignite curiosity for viewers and create conversation around the "pre-history" of America,”
The exhibition, organized by independent curator and contemporary art scholar Erin Joyce, will be on view starting September 19th, and will be up through the life of the murals, until natural elements, weather, and time deteriorate them, allowing the honesty to the material and medium of wheat paste to be fully articulated and explored by the viewer
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sacramento based artist, Cheyenne Randall (Cheyenne River), has been working in mixed media for over twenty years. Largely known for his extensive and ongoing photoshop tattoo series entitled “Shoppedtattoos” he has simultaneously pushed the boundaries of traditional tattoo culture and idolatry. He is also known for his colorful and contemporary mixed media works depicting Indigenous North American Leaders with reverence and originality.
Cheyenne’s work has drawn the attention of Hollywood’s most notable designers and even landed his work in the pages of Architectural Digest. He has been honored to create work for major motion pictures as well as private commissions for some of the world's most beloved musicians and actors.
Randall has always had a fascination with forgotten and uninhabited structures and the way they interact with the landscape of America. A number of years ago he began #PastingtheWest, an homage to impermanence, leaving mementos of his work scattered where they would decay and perhaps never be seen by anyone. This project was in fact seen by many and ultimately led him to a residency at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona and installations in some of the west coast’s finest hotels, restaurants and private homes.
