Catherine Cooper: Your artwork sends very powerful messages. Examples I think of are Blood Work with the cutting of your multicolored beard and the photo 7/16th with your Native American identification information superimposed on a photo of your face. Also, the photos of you in the hanging cage in your early photography work engaged my mind with images of a pseudo type of freedom. The hidden figure wrapped in barbed wire from Surviving also sticks in my mind. What ideas are you driven to communicate through your artwork?

11 Years of Beards

11 Years of Beards

Da-ka-xeen Mehner: The ideas I try to convey change over time, but at the heart of the work I feel like I do what most artists are doing, defining myself in the time and space that I live. The Surviving and early works were a way for me to process my childhood. Growing up with all the trappings of the urban Indian experience, poverty, alcoholism both with my family and my own wrestlings with alcohol, abuse and the shame and hiding of all these things that came out in the early work. With the blood work and the 7/16 I want to communicate to the world that we as Native people have this system of identification placed upon us. It is a system that creates a schism in the collective minds of Native people. It is a system that I find many people do not know about, every time I show the piece there are at least a few people I have to explain the CIB card to.

 

7-16th

 

CC:  I am currently studying photography. This term my project involves self-portraits and is titled Plural Identity. This feels like a highly self-revealing project. Blood Work and some of your early photography work involve a lot of self-portraiture. The staged photos from Reinterpretation Gallery 2 also involve self-portraits. What leads you to use self-portraiture as a form of expression?

DM: I find self-portraiture to be a great way to examine the self in relation to the world. I feel free to comment on large issues but centered from a personal perspective. I was once asked if I thought of myself as a political artist, and I never felt comfortable speaking for anyone else, but myself. I can make work about the “blood-quantum” system or the construct of historical photographs, which affects all Native Americans, but from my own personal vantage point.

Survive

CC:  I read in the article, Mixed Medium by Sarah Henning, that you began drawing when you were young and that you were encouraged to develop your talent. Who were your strongest influences and how did you come to use the camera as your art medium in your early work?

DM:  My Uncle is an artist, Larry McNeil, and he has had a great impact on my life and art. He gave me my first medium and large formant cameras. It was his influence that got me interested in photography; I was at IAIA when he showed me the magic of Polaroid type 55 film. I still use those cameras, when I use film. His work and career have always been an inspiration and made me believe that art as a career was possible for me.

Da-ka-xeen Mehner with uncle Larry McNeil

CC:  Which of your projects are you most proud of?  Which one is your favorite?

DM:  Well it always seems that I am most engaged with my current work, but looking back there are two projects that I feel are my best works. First are the Reinterpretation series of photos. In going through the museum archives online, I stumbled across a description of an image of a Tlingit man named Da-yuk-hene, which is almost certainly a phonetic variation of my name, Da-ka-xeen. This launched me on an examination of photographic visual history. Case and Draper in Juneau, Alaska took that image in 1906. As I studied our visual history and writings on Native Americans, I realized that it is an outsider view of my culture that I am left with. The Case and Draper images are a perfect example of the constructed identity of Native-ness through the lens of the “other”. I feel a need to deconstruct the images of the past. Reinterpreting the image, I reconstruct the pose but with the tools I use on a daily basis. The camera I had received from my Uncle, and the adz I had made for myself and wearing the jacket my mother had given me for my wedding day. In each image I change the text to reflect my presence in the reinterpreted image. By mirroring this image, I attempt to reflect both the truth and fiction of this history. This mirrored format is derived from the bilateral form-line design structure commonly found in carved screens. What is fact and what is false in our photographic history taken by others is vague. They exist side by side and for me, reflecting and reconstructing these images helps me identify both. By reversing the archival image, I attempt to reverse the history constructed about Native peoples.

Native Photographer

The Thlinget Artist

Reflection

Alone with his Thoughts

The second would be the Weapons of Mass Defense, a series of 8’ tall steel sculptures based on Tlingit fighting knives, commonly known as “double-headed daggers.” These were weapons only used in warfare, but in my artwork I think of them as defensive weapons to protect culture.

Weapons of Mass Defense

Weapons of Mass Defense

Da-ka-xeen Mehner with Weapons of Defense

CC: Your creativity comes out with a strong Native American tone, yet the style of your work is non-traditional. For example, although mask making is a strong part of Tlingit cultures, when I look at your masks and look at masks made long ago by Tlingit people, yours have a unique look. In what ways does traditional Tlingit style influence your work and artistic processes? 

DM:  I was always aware of my culture, but it wasn’t until I started my graduate work at The Native Art Center here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks that I really started to draw directly from the material culture of my people. It was the first time that in my education that I felt free to make Tlingit art history the center of my artistic practice and draw from its forms for inspiration. Tlingit artistic style permeates my work. The bilateral design of the form-line design can be seen in quite a bit of my photography, although the form-line has been replaced with photographic imagery the structure is the same. Double-headed daggers, bentwood boxes, masks all are part of the visual language that I work with and are direct references of Tlingit material culture.

Performing the Mask

Performing the Mask

Weapons of Mass Defense

Weapons of Mass Defense

Weapons of Mass Defense

CC:  I feel cultural identity is a big aspect of maturing as a person and as a community.  I, too, am “multi-racial” and have always looked to any of my ancestral background for guidance and identity. This is not an easy thing to do for many people. Given your multi-cultural background, what is your perception of the Native American artist community in regards to recognition of Native American art?  Would you consider a non-registered Native American’s artwork as “Native American”?

DM:  This is a tricky question, and one that I am constantly thinking about. Now I want to be clear, it seems that you are asking specifically about artist with native ancestry, but for whatever reason are not registered. In that case I would have no problem considering that person as a Native American artist. I do not believe we should let the government define who we are.

Untitled Assemblage

Untitled Assemblage

Untitled Assemblage

CC: Will you share a bit of what your next project will be?

DM: My son has just turned 2 recently and is fascinated with Tlingit drumming and dancing. I’ve been going through and relearning a number of our songs and have started on some work about that process. I’ve been looking at the drum itself as a form of inspiration, with some video aspect in the work, myself singing the songs, and projected on the drums. This work has all just begun and I’m not sure where it will go, but that’s what I’m working on now.

CC:  What advice do you offer aspiring artists?

DM:  Take advantage of every opportunity out there, they are all around you, you just have to look. Be honest with your work, if you are true to your work, people will notice. And just to keep at it, keep making, keep showing, and keep thinking.

Biography: Da-ka-xeen Mehner

Da-ka-xeen Mehner (Tlingit/N’ishga) uses the tools of family ancestry and personal history to build his art. Born in Fairbanks, Alaska to a Tlingit/N’ishga Mother and Hippy/American father his work stems from an examination of a multicultural heritage and social expectations and definitions. Da-ka-xeen was raised in two environments, one as an urban Native in Anchorage and the other as a rural Hippy in Fairbanks living without electricity, running water or phones, and heating the house with a wood stove. In particular his work has focused on the constructs of Native American identity, and an attempt to define the Self outside of these constructs. He uses the materials and tools of his family to express himself. From the steel and concrete of his Labor Union father, to the crook knife and cedar of his Alaska Native ancestors, Da-ka-xeen Mehner’s artwork reflects his heritage. In an expanded view of “tradition,” Da-ka-xeen also includes the inherited tools and skills of photography that were passed down to him from his maternal Uncles.

Da-ka-xeen received his A.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. From 1994-2000 Mehner served as the founder and director of Site 21/21, a contemporary art gallery in Albuquerque, NM, and was a founding member/owner of the (Fort) 105 Art Studios in downtown Albuquerque in 1998. Da-ka-xeen returned to Alaska in 2000 and earned his M.F.A in Native Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

His work in photography and sculpture has been exhibited from New York to California; Alaska to New Mexico. Collections include the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the University of Alaska Museum of the North (Fairbanks, AK), and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (Santa Fe, NM), and the Alaska State Museum (Juneau, AK). His work has been featured in the art magazines Sculpture and American Indian Art, and in numerous newspapers, art catalogs, and blogs. He is an Assistant Professor of Native Arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the director of the UAF Native Arts Center.