“I really feel prefer it’s vital once I discuss about my apply to introduce my arms first,” Eric-Paul Riege mentioned as he held up his long-fingered, tattooed arms to the display screen, flipping his palms first towards, then away from the digicam. Riege was calling from his residence in Gallup, New Mexico, the place he grew up, near the Arizona border and the Navajo Nation reservation. “My arms knew what they had been presupposed to do earlier than my physique did,” he added. The artist is Diné/Navajo, and comes from a protracted line of weavers and makers. For him, working in fiber is an inherited and intuitive expertise.
Riege works not solely in fiber, but additionally set up, efficiency, collage, and digital media. Nonetheless, in his thoughts, all of it comes again to weaving. “I name every part I do weaving,” he mentioned, referring, for instance, to his performances as “weaving dances.” Along with making elaborately detailed fiber sculptures and wearable regalia, he phases durational performances, athletic feats of improvisational dance. All the weather—the supplies, the efficiency, the viewers, in addition to the ancestors and rituals that inform his apply—are woven collectively.
Riege graduated from the College of New Mexico in 2017, the place he double majored in studio artwork and ecology and minored in Navajo language and linguistics. His curiosity in language finds its means into his work via his titles, which are sometimes stylized interpretations of phrases with purposeful misspellings or letters and characters altered to imitate the shapes of his sculptures. His first solo exhibition, on the Institute of Modern Artwork, Miami, in 2019, was titled “Hólǫ́—it xistz.” The title used each the Navajo phrase hólǫ́, that means
“it exists,” and an web slang model of “it exists” in English. Throughout the exhibition, Riege introduced two six-hour performances within the gallery, his physique adorned with black paint and swathed in fiber artwork items. He wove via his black-and-white fiber sculptures, a few of which he faraway from their shows and donned whereas he roamed the gallery, at occasions swinging backwards and forwards in a meditative dance. Heaped with layered textiles and dangling woolen tassels, Riege tiptoed delicately as if the handfuls of additional kilos he wore had been weightless. He carried out the contemplative dancelike ritual principally in silence, aside from the sound of staffs that the artist banged repetitively on the ground, just like the acquainted clacking of a loom.
Riege’s artwork objects typically get divided up—scarred, torn, and reconstituted—then reused in new items. Components of earlier works will seemingly reappear this month within the Toronto Biennial, the place Riege is slated to supply a house for Her, an set up evoking his childhood residence—a web site that commonly haunts his desires. A number of looms will kind the define of the home, which he has entered solely as soon as since his household moved out over a decade in the past, regardless that their new home sits simply subsequent door. The weavings for this venture, which Riege made in collaboration with the ladies in his household, pay homage to inherited craft, cosmology, and data. The set up and accompanying efficiency intention each to revive and exorcise the previous residence.
CURRENTLY ON VIEW: An set up by Eric-Paul Riege within the Toronto Biennial of Artwork, Mar. 26–June 5, 2022.