The Negotiation Table

My latest Negotiation Table is entitled Cycle | Breaking and Making. The table I have reclaimed is Canadian-made with US-made parts. It is a knock-off of a popular European furniture style called the Chippendale, which itself is an appropriation of Ming and Tang Dynasty furniture styles. The popularity of this furniture arose around the time that European nations began funding expeditions in search of a shorter route to Asia. Europeans’ obsession with Asia ultimately catalyzed their westward expansion and colonization of Turtle Island.

I have cut into this knock-off of a stolen table design. I have made an indelible mark to keep the history of diaspora in the public’s living memory. By creating a record, remembering becomes a key function in long-term justice.

The woodblocks embedded in the table resemble inlaid jade. They depict two birds, Fènghuáng 鳳凰, also sometimes known as the Chinese Phoenix, and the Homing Pigeon. Fènghuáng is a mythological bird that is purported to disappear during times of political corruption–and reemerge following the rise of new leadership and an era of peace and harmony. The homing pigeon is a bird that I grew up raising, and a personal symbol of diaspora, class strife, and finding home.

Photo on left by Michael Love

米 mǐ | uncooked rice is an installation based on representational disparities in the US arts industry. mǐ is about unfolding the emotional and personal core for why this data matters, to reveal that underneath the numbers are people’s lives.

米 (mǐ) is the Chinese word for uncooked rice and other grains, a metaphor for that which could sustain us, but in its unprocessed form is indigestible.

Data about who has representation in the art world unfolds to reveal personal stories that constitute the whole. A laminated placemat displays US population percentages side-by-side with representation in US museums, galleries, and private art collections. Bowls on the table are either overflowing or under-filled, based on each population’s representation in the arts. For instance, while white men are 31% of the US (as represented by a 31 ounce bowl), their bowl overflows with 77% of the rice served on the table. Meanwhile, women of color collectively are less than half of one percent of the artists represented and collected in North America; their bowls contain only a couple grains of rice each.

A tri-fold menu unfolds to reveals a timeline of my family’s story, told via food as a political and socioeconomic indicator.

An Ethic is a Root navigates and negotiates how we arrive at our ethics. What do we risk when we uphold our ethics? And what makes the risks worthwhile?

The central image in this series is a map of my migration route, from where I grew up on the lands of the Kansa, Osage, Kickapoo, and Shawnee, to each of my homes including Teejop (land of the Ho-Chunk, Madison, WI) to my current home on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh in what is called Vancouver, British Columbia.

In the two woodblock prints, I made water, instead of land, the geographic anchor, with the Great Lakes blooming at the top of the map. I oriented the map with my route(s) growing downward.

My mother still resides in my last childhood home in rural Kansas. Agricultural runoff and nearby development have made the soil poor. The land around my mother’s house regularly erodes and floods when it rains.

Yet the iris flower continues to grow here. Irises are known for growing in places with polluted water, effectively removing toxins and holding soil together.