Cannupa Hanska Luger is an artist working in mixed-media as varied as ceramics, textile, performance, and film. This breadth of forms reveals the work of a “rez hooligan”: hot, edgy, crazy, but seriously purposeful. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation, South Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes and resides outside the Santa Fe art mecca. Over just fifteen years, Luger’s work has been embraced by international museums, galleries, and collectors of conceptual art. Large scale, colorful, and obtuse, Luger’s art is a favorite for institutions seeking artists whose divergent styles reflect larger societal concerns and overt problems that plague on a worldwide basis. Although his aim is to communicate to audiences generally unfamiliar with Native positions of contention, Luger uses familiar, often recycled materials and clay to stage difficult scenarios. His pieces deal with conditions that affect principally Native communities, including sexual violence against women and girls, with future hopes for a self-sustaining ecology. In some cases, his timely responses can be plucked from Pop images that formulate in off-color recognition of too familiar iconic themes. With far ranging topics and innovative material transfiguration, Luger’s art leans toward the surreal with a contemporary timeliness.

      Using Indian stereotypic assemblages and found objects recontextualized in the gallery setting, Luger’s works often harken to the earliest works and installations by the late James Luna, an enrolled member of the LaJolla Band of Mission Indians. However, in Luger’s hands, the seething vexation and brooding jibes of Luna are mollified by installation scale, humorous insertion, and series-referenced theme development. Although a generation removed from Luna, he contends with the continuation of problematic issues that surround art commercialism, tribal place, cultural stereotyping, and mixed-blood identity. To this end, Cannupa produces monster figures in a new mythos drawn from tales of epic battles. In the balance hangs the survival of a society endangered by the threats created by human hands.

      Corruption and Harm, the clay and mixed-media dismembered head and arm of a monster, are both detailed with anatomical specificity. Harm extends from severed shoulder to fingertips with shoulder bones exposed and golden teeth marks embedded on the forefinger. Incised on each finger in Gothic script is a single letter spelling the work’s title. Recalling the tradition of painted Classic marble statuary and broken fragments in galleries of Italian antiquities where students availed themselves in drawing, the arm is a singular fragment laid out for public inspection. Did someone bite the hand that feeds? The artist does reluctantly confess it was his mouth that stuck into the clay. In reference to color, does yellow hold significance to Indigenous meanings or directional associations, or is it an aesthetically driven choice?

      In Corruption, a dismembered monster’s head grotesquely stares with tongue splayed from its gapping mouth and felt and yarn hair framing the blank gaze of vacant eyes. At the neck stump, three circular forms reference a spinal column and major arteries severed with a clean blow. Gruesome and repellant, the sense of disgust is tempered by the work’s title, which draws attention to the societal ills that create the perversion, depravity and moral deterioration of self, public institutions, communities, or cause. The monsters of Luger’s work are defeated and destroyed. However, observers are left with a sense of query and reluctance that all ills are yet to be conquered. Some remain locked and secreted away till his next series is revealed.

Images courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery.