VSF is proud to announce Reflection, our first solo exhibition with Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976, Madison, Wisconsin, works in Minneapolis, Minnesota) in Los Angeles. The exhibition follows our two-person presentation of work by Diedrick Brackens and White Hawk at Frieze LA earlier this year. White Hawk’s abstract paintings, which often include areas of beadwork, were a highlight of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Reflection includes new paintings and mixed-media works in addition to an eight-channel video installation titled LISTEN, which features the voices and geographies of women speakers of eight Indigenous-American languages.
An exploration of abstraction, as a global human practice connected to expression, adornment, language, and ontology, is the core of White Hawk’s work. Her compelling geometric compositions derive from her immersion in the aesthetic lineages of artworks - paintings, beadwork, quillwork and regalia - made by Indigenous American artists, art forms historically upheld by women; as well as her study of European- American and European artists, influenced by the use of abstraction from many indigenous cultures, who cultivated styles like Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, and stripe painting. Besides making abstract compositions, White Hawk addresses abstraction as a conceptual strategy. For example, one of the abstractions that her work centers, is that of the influence of, particularly Indigenous American, artists outside of the western canon on the development of abstract styles in painting that became core to the narratives of artistic genius and modernism, where this influence is rarely mentioned as anything beyond a parenthetical.
When looking at White Hawk’s mixed media works, which combine beadwork with painting, the beads sit up above the painted surface, asserting themselves in the foreground of the picture plane.
