University of Winnipeg and downtown community newspaper
University of Winnipeg and downtown community newspaper
Artist: Jamison Chas Banks
Title: Crypsis: Eradication Methods
Dates: June 1, 2018 – July 7, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday June 1, 8pm-11pm
Location: Main and Marvin Francis Media Art Gallery
Artist Statement
As humankind currently menaces through the 6th great extinction, one could argue that humankind’s earliest common reality or consciousness began when we started to create narratives of hunting that were illustrated on rocks or cave walls. Hunting sustained our early ancestors and helped to devise ways that disguised or manipulated our forms in turn enhancing our basis for camouflage. Animals not only provided life sustaining food, shelter, and clothing; they also enshrined fundamental ideas of medicine, myth, and ritual.
These foundation stories allowed us to reckon our place in our environment and they must have been filled wonderment and complex mystery. Paradoxically, it was this mystery and ongoing threat from animals that spurned our current extinction dilemma. The ability to camouflage or crypsis allowed our ancestors to have a foothold in the arms race imbalance against our animal adversaries. This was of course a mirror reflection of what the animals themselves had evolved with their own patterns of concealment in order to remain undetected.
All cultures were at some point, and some have maintained, an “intertwinedness” with their environment and also specific region’s animals. In the modern sense, the fight to dominate Mother Nature’s paradise has spiraled out of control to the point that the original animal camouflaging has escalated into the animals actually becoming “invisibled”.
We must remember that this onslaught between hunting and sustainability for our own species is not that much different from full-scale human warfare. Both endeavors seek to use stealth, bear weapons, use deception, and ultimately dominate a force or region. The only real difference is scale and ferocity.
Ultimately for me, the Eradication Methods Laboratory is a visual code that at one level seeks to continue the legacy of Paleolithic art on rock and cave walls. The Eradication Methods Laboratory’s objective is to be seen as a modern cave painting with a central focus that remains cognizant of prehistoric awareness of surroundings while withholding appeasement/reverance to a higher order of sacred wonderment.
Biography
Jamison Chās Banks is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates films, paintings, per-formances, and installations. His works often explore the history of war and territorial expansion, both literal and psychological. Banks appropriates and alters symbols em-ployed in propaganda and popular culture and redeploys them in contexts that subvert their original meanings. He usually begins with an area of investigation that spawns a series of interrelated artworks in different media.
For example, during his residency at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe in 2013 Banks created a film, screen prints, and a performance as part of the pro-ject Territories: The Frontier. Initially inspired the history of service in the armed forces by members of the artist’s family, this project explored the recent wars that the United States has been engaged in not as singular incidents, but part of a cyclical history.
Image: "Kickapoo Indian Oil Bottle" by artist Jamison Chās Banks, serigraph on paper. Courtesy of artist.