Angelica Trimble-Yanu: Strata
Kala Art Institute is excited to present Strata, a new installation by Angelica Trimble-Yanu at Milvia/ Addison Windows located at 2100 Milvia Street, Berkeley. There will be an artist reception outside at Milvia/ Addison Windows on Thursday, July 13, 5-6pm. Please stop by and say hello!
Angelica Trimble-Yanu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California and an enrolled member of the Oglála Lakȟóta Nation from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Angelica has received a Bachelor of General Fine Arts at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon with a focus in printmaking and Indigenous Studies.
“As an Indigenous Oglála Lakȟóta Artist, My interdisciplinary approach to printmaking and sculpture evokes an ancestral remembrance through the careful consideration of my sacred homelands in the Makȟóšiča (Badlands) and the Ȟe Sápa (Black Hills). My Monotypes feature graphic black and white strokes that linger between representation and abstraction, absence and presence, and the tangible and intangible. This in-between space that my work exists in, is a reclamation of Indigenous worldview, landscape, and history. I look to explore physicality and spirituality by merging the site-specific processes of sculpture and printmaking and examining the Lakȟóta relationship between the human and non-human world. I look to bridge the spiritual and physical world together into an enticing embodiment of ceremony through a Lakȟóta perspective, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (“All My Relations”). These acknowledgments of Lakota kinship while respecting and evoking protection of our sacred is at the heart of my work and is a powerful container to hold these traditional Lakota positions around shape, color and sacred numerical theologies.
Light, movement, and time are transcribed into the malleable surfaces of my paper sculptures, embodying a tangibility of ceremony and tradition that transcends settler conceptions of time and space. I look to landscape as a non-static idea, but a dynamic site of cultural practice. By operating with a strict palette of Lakota colors Black, White, Yellow, and Red. I utilize this powerful form of language and symbolism to share and hold traditional and ancestral knowledge. I am interested in how Indigenous relations to storytelling and narrative can fight cultural assimilation and uplift our unique and individual voices. Although printmaking is the backbone of my practice, the sculptural aspect has become an increasingly important part of my process. These sculptural movements are important to me because they convey a greater purpose to reclaim and carry my ancestors’ stories forward. My work is a visual proxy of Indigenous adaptation to the contemporary world. I explore complex concepts of identity, ancestral memory, sacred homeland, and traditional knowledge as we move through the current and into the future. Utilizing sculpture, film, and printmaking, I look to interpret these otherworldly landscapes to communicate a spiritual and political dance between being and place.”
– Angelica Trimble-Yanu
