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Auto Immune Response #2
Auto Immune Response #2
Auto Immune Response #2

Auto Immune Response #2

Artist (American, Navajo, born 1969)
Date2005
Mediumpigment print
DimensionsImage: 23 1/2 x 40 3/8 in. (59.7 x 102.6 cm)
Frame: 29 11/16 x 46 x 13/16 in. (75.4 x 116.8 x 2.1 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds from the Clinton King Purchase Award, 2013
Object number2013.22
DescriptionHigh view of the Grand Canyon with sky. Three figures populate the space, one at lower right seated with his back to viewer, on at middle left seated with back to viewer, and one at left standing with right arm extended to sprinkle pollen. Figure is wearing a light shirt, dark pants, and a gas mask.
Text Entries

The artist appears three times in this photograph, which was made on the Navajo side of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

 

The Auto Immune Response series began  in 2005 with an initial group of  images made for an exhibition at the Heard Museum, organized by Joe Baker. The artist’s idea was to trace the story of  a Navajo man in a post-apocalyptic world, traversing an unpopulated, toxic landscape and using prosthetic devices to survive.  The seven works in the show were 45 x 115 inches each. The images include family sites and Dine ceremonial practices. The story evolved as the man finds an abandoned Hogan to use as his home base and the artist created a bed that has air and water pumps. His use of non-standard dimensions for a photograph is intended to emulate how we see and to extend the range of the medium. The series now includes 20 images and may continue as the character moves into a time of reconstruction and begins growing food in the Hogan. In addition to the Heard Museum, work from this series has been shown at the Native American Museum in New York and at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis.

Part of the artist’s larger installation envisioning the life of a survivor of the apocalypse, this image shows three views of a lone Diné (Navajo) man wearing a breathing apparatus in a world hostile to human habitation. Making his way to the rim of the Grand Canyon at dawn, he faces east and makes an offering of corn pollen with his morning prayers, seeking harmony in a beautiful but inhospitable environment.

“The series is an allegorical investigation of the extraordinarily rapid transformation of Indigenous lifeways, the dis-ease it has caused, and strategies of response that enable cultural survival,” Wilson writes. His project is sometimes realized in three dimensions with an installation of a hogan (traditional dwelling) greenhouse, the Auto Immune Response Research Facility, where Indigenous food plants are grown. Wilson sees the series itself as “a pollinator,” intended to foster other challenges to prevailing social, cultural, and environmental systems.

 

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