Kade Twist
Kade L. Twist is a writer and multidisciplinary artist working with installation, video, two-dimensional media, text, and sound. Twist’s written and visual work explores how dominant economic systems impact Indigenous and intercultural sensibilities. A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Twist has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Arizona State University Art Museum. He is a member of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary American Indian arts collective that focuses on the contemporary realities of globalism and neoliberalism.
Twist asserts that when Indigenous people see the land, they see the land, however when colonizers come, they see financial and hegemonic potential. The configured economic spaces that stem from this philosophy are imparted with imagined narratives of First Peoples. Examples include Our Land Your Imagination (2008), a series of multi-channel video installations that acknowledge the impact of Judeo-Christian Western scientific world views on the now suburban landscapes of North America. In one installation from the series Twist re-contextualizes Youtube videos of women singing songs about love, loss, and longing. Juxtaposed are slow-moving images of the suburban detritus from where they live. Cars whizz by on busy roads, cookie-cutter homes become melancholic backdrops, and an empty house is scoured—a reminder of broken dreams and economic downfalls. The melodic work reveals the complexities caused by inherited colonial ideologies that dominate intercultural engagements with the land.
Twist’s visual process involves transferring and repositioning his writing into installations. The poem such “Marginal Equity” provide text for the video installation What Did You Find Out West? (2009). Twist reflects upon the impact of moving away from important cultural groundings, such as the seven sacred fires, in search of perceived economic opportunities. Fusing haunting sound, pieces of his poetry and Cherokee syllabics, he exposes the tension that exists for those who grapple for place and resolution in consumerist systems. Here, the use of Cherokee text exists as cultural codification, referencing Cherokee sensibilities in encoded form. The work calls to those whose sense of cultural self is altered from diasporic existences and is a reminder that removal from home does not negate culture, but alters cultural experience.
Through re-imagining tribal stories, Twist also embeds a Cherokee cultural system within the art. In the ongoing video series Buzzard Via Satellite, Twist repositions tribal narratives to look at landscape and colonial interference. Narratives such as the “Cherokee Story of the Hunter and Buzzard” create visual metaphors about the treatment of First Peoples and the California Condor, a bird nearly driven to extinction that is now held captive in a federal government endangered species breeding program. In these works, the at times tense intercultural engagements with the land are exposed, while affirming Cherokee presence and sensibility. Twist thoughtfully probes our contemporary existences, reminding us how we got here and questioning where we are going.