Anna Tsouhlarakis
By Ryan Rice
Artist Anna Tsouhlarakis relies on art to speak a new language—a fresh vocabulary for a Native experience to flourish beyond the expectations, limitations and prejudices placed upon it. By drawing upon identity—personal, and public, historical and contemporary—Tsouhlarakis substantiates identity’s relevance, its impact for locating sovereignty and memory, and its ability to deconstruct social conventions.
A Master of Fine Arts graduate (2002) of Yale University, Tsouhlarakis’s work consists of various media including sculpture, installation, video, and performance art. In her solo exhibition/installation Clash Of the Titans (2007), Tsouhlarakis converges and collapses her lineage, the ancient heritages of Greek, Creek, and Diné, as a hybrid form of intertwined knowledge systems, bloodlines, and recognizable aesthetics and artifacts. Her artwork concedes to an ongoing shift in cultural revolutions. Tsouhlarakis employs the rubric of identity politics to make sense of contemporary issues of globalization and transnationalism in both a realistic and imagined way. By emphasizing a clash in cultures, Tsouhlarakis stirs the historical, political, and philosophical remnants she has inherited—intuitively, iconically/symbolically, and at birth. For the exhibition, she fashioned sculpture, drawings, and media within a classical Western genre and set them conscientiously within a “Native” determined space (American Indian Community House Gallery, New York, New York), boldly merging and challenging the invented dichotomy of the Old World / New World to construct a contemporary space. In doing so, she develops a discourse far from our ghettoized and stagnant (yet popular and relevant) mythologies.
In Travois (1999), a public performance/intervention, Tsouhlarakis takes the innovative Plains traditional technology of transportation ironically “on the road.” Dragging her loaded, two-poled and lash-constructed vehicle, Tsouhlarakis navigates the paved streets alongside wheel-based counterparts. Her intervention emphasizes, as well as challenges, the universality and necessity of transportation amidst modernism, economy, and efficiency. Similarly, Tsouhlarakis relies on the performative element via video documentation as a means for negotiation of social presumptions and the complexities of culture in Let’s Dance! (2004). Shot within a thirty-day period, Let’s Dance! (exhibited in the touring show Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World) documents Tsouhlarakis’s attempt to learn thirty social, ethnic, and popular dances such as the waltz, the Lindy, the Irish jig, and the Hokey Pokey. Guided by instructors, she intentionally engages haphazardly with the steps and movement. In doing so, she almost mocks the expression (and/or the refinement) that continues to be diluted, ridiculed, and entertained in popular culture by non-natives. In a similar manner in which Native American dance, ritual, and performance has been understood as primitive, Tsouhlarakis playfully mimicks “the other.”
Tsouhlarakis’s greater body of work (And They Said, 2004; Crossing, 2000) embodies an attempt to socially change signifiers that frame Native art and identity. She is driven to complicate matters further by addressing issues of representation and identity politics as they have been, and still are, framed by a Western perspective. Her work raises fundamental and profound questions and exposes the interface between the canon of art and cultural, racial, and ethnic boundaries. Decolonization, reclamation and redefining are methodologies/strategies required to attend to the complex intercultural terrain she traverses. In her artist statement, Tsouhlarakis explains, “By reclamation, I mean depicting images of Indians in non-stereotypical ways as well as redefining what Native means. This redefinition includes breaking down the bureaucracy that has surrounded Native life, both personally and federally.”[1] She is not alone.
[1] Anna Tsouhlarakis website, www.naveeks.com.