Dragon Eye
January 26 - March 02,2024
From SP/N Gallery:
"A new multi-channel exhibition by artist–scholar Thomas Riccio, whose work spans video, installation, social practice, and performance. Dragon Eye is based on his twenty years of ethnographic documentation of the Miao people, a long-suppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised ethnic minority living in southwest China. The Han invaded the Miao, the indigenous people of China. After centuries of wars and repressions, the Miao were colonized and forced to flee to the isolated mountainous regions of southern China, where their culture and way of life remained largely intact and unmolested. Since early this century, however, government initiatives have brought roads, electrification, and telecommunication to the region, causing the rapid transformation of the Miao. The economic migration of Miao youth to China’s cities, the spread of consumerism, and the Communist Party policy of weakening and increasingly suppressing ethnic distinctions have challenged and accelerated the decline of the ancient culture, traditions, and identity of the Miao.
For the last thirty years, Riccio has used ethnography as a form of documentation, creativity, and activism. Work that serves to preserve rapidly vanishing indigenous ways and knowledge while bringing awareness to the social, political, and economic transformation of our world and environment. Indigenous traditions are rooted and evolve from a place. They are shaped by and in relationship with a community of place, one that includes humans, animals, flora, geography, spirits, and ancestors. The objective and ethos of indigenous cultures is to live with and be responsible for a place. Rituals, mythologies, and lifestyles encode, reiterate, and maintain lived values and worldviews. Indigenous knowledge is embodied, orally, and sensorily transmitted, and fragile. In our era of rapacious denigration and neglect of the earth and impending environmental catastrophe, indigenous knowledge needs to be heard, reconsidered, and given a voice in creating a better and more sustainable, balanced, and verdant world.
Dragon Eye refers to a square red stone each Miao village family has at the entrance or center of the house. The position of the stone is determined by a local badai, the Miao shaman, after consultation with a Xian Niang, a female spirit medium. For the Miao, the dragon embodies the essence of life. Having the dragon live with the family brings prosperity, good luck, and a good harvest. Beneath the dragon eye stone is a bowl and wine, which pleases, calms, and honors the dragon that lives eternally. Symbolically, each dragon eye watches out for the house and connects to a central village well where the dragon lives, with the dragon maintaining a networked community.
The Dragon Eye installation is an impressionistic and sensorial glimpse of contemporary Miao life. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of video and audio and thousands of photos from the last two decades of field research. Riccio presents an atmosphere, feel, insight, and essence, with the sounds and images bespeaking a culture ancient and modern as it transitions and vanishes into history. A dragon well procession is part of the installation, as are other rituals and spirit medium sessions, revealing how the material, spiritual, and mythic coexist and collaborate. Village daily life, the rugged landscape, events, people, market day, political functions, and quiet moments portray a life seldom seen by the outside world. The installation is best understood as experimental ethnography, alive and shaped for artistic understanding and impact rather than academic documentation.
Riccio has worked extensively with indigenous groups worldwide as a performance ethnographer and creator. Groups he has worked with include the Yup’ik and Inupiat of Alaska, the Zulu of South Africa, the Sakha of central Siberia (which declared him a Cultural Hero), and groups in Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia, Korea, Russia, India, Burkina Faso, and with the !Xuu Bushmen of the Kalahari. He is a Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at UTD. He has been a visiting professor at several universities, most recently Jishou University in Hunan, where he assisted in developing a cultural center to document the ritual traditions of the Miao. He has published articles on Miao ritual and is working on a book. A documentary of the Huan Nuo Yuan ritual has been shown at film festivals internationally; he is in post-production for another documentary."
Reception: January 26, 2024 | 6-8 pm
SP/N Gallery at Synergy Park North 2 (UT Dallas)
3020 Stewart Dr.
Richardson, Texas 75080
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