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Joe Feddersen - Colville Confederated Tribes
Interview by Katie Ross
March 2010
Joe Feddersen is a multi-media artist who includes patterns from the past with modern-day patterns. He gets these patterns from the landscape around him, just like his ancestors did. The main difference between these landscape patterns is that they used to come from mountains and rivers, but now come from bricks and parking lots. Joe Feddersen makes his work about investigating these concepts.
Above: Parking Lot, Middle: Fish Trap Series, Bottom: Freeway With HOV
Katie Ross: What aspects of being an artist do you enjoy? What aspects of teaching or being an educator did you enjoy?
Joe Feddersen: I really enjoy making things and I’m really curious. A lot of my work is about investigation, it’s about thinking about things and exploring ideas.
KR: Do you prefer to do either solo or group work? And does the outcome differ for either way?
JF: Well I enjoy working by myself but sometimes working as a group is really interesting too, it kind of depends on the project. Sometimes you’re working in group situations and that can be really fantastic or a lot of times your work can end up being more isolated.KR: All of your work has a very contemporary look to it but also has traditional influences. Would you consider yourself a contemporary artist but also a traditional one?
JF: I guess I would consider myself somewhere in a broad spectrum in between the two. Connotations of tradition there’s a lot of things I don’t do so I guess I would consider myself at the extreme end of tradition.
Above: Wyit View
KR: How do you pick your color schemes?
JF: Well I’m not really a symbolist where you pick red and means blood or black and it means this or that. But a lot of times it’s kind of very intuitive and I usually seek an emotional response so that influences my work. But also when I’m in the landscape I see color combinations and I’m really fascinated with luminosity, so by observation I guess also.KR: You work in painting, three-dimensional constructions, photography, computer generated imagery, and printmaking. You are best known for your printmaking, but is this your favorite medium to work in? Why or why not?
JF: My work is an investigation and sometimes different media are better suited for what I’m working on, so it’s often those kinds of processes.KR: I really like the Urban Indian series; especially the sculptures with the tire tread patterns on them. I find it ironic that even though tires are a new invention, the makers named them after romanticized western names. Why do you think they did this?
JF: I think they did it for that reason. You know they portray names that are a romanticized version of the West.
Above: Wrangler
KR: What traditional imagery do you use in your work?
JF: My work is really based on basket patterns and lines so a lot of the traditional designs are from that. But also the form, it’s about the form of the baskets, sometimes its traditional shape and sometimes it’s a traditional pattern.KR: Where do you get inspiration for your prints?
JF: Well that depends upon which one you’re talking about, they are all different.KR: What drives you to experiment with different printmaking techniques?
JF: Well I love making things. And I’ve always been really fascinated by how you do different things. When I started the Plateau Geometric series, I was really interested in combining where I am from, Plateau area of Washington State, with all those processes I learned from printmaking. So the Plateau Geometric has dry point lines, collagraphy, relief, and some of them have aqua pens, and all these printmaking processes. Part of it is I want to celebrate where I’m from but also celebrate the processes that I’ve picked up over all the years. So it’s kind of a combination of those things, process and content.
Above: Plateau Geometrics #187
KR: You refer to Glen Alps as your mentor and that he would give talks about life. What was the most important message you took away from these talks?
JF: He was really inspirational. A lot of people would think he would be really related to the process because he was known for giving a name to the collagraph. But when we would work in the studio, we would talk all day about different things. And one of them is clearly aesthetic, but the main talks I remember from him is when he would talk about the freedom of the artist. About the individual choosing their own direction, and I could say that in two minutes but he would spend an hour talking about that. He would also talk about color and he had this whole theory about yellow, and the importance of yellow, and creating a vibrancy and being at the center of the rainbow and that it had a certain catalytic power. So I guess that is how I choose color. He also talked about how art was like breathing, like when you go to a doctor’s office and the doctor tells you to inhale and exhale and how that’s a heightening experience. So creating art should be like how you breath, you know when the doctor finishes they say you can breathe normally now, and he would equate that to how that’s a heightened experience when you’re in the blur of things but you make sure that your breathing becomes more natural and part of yourself. And the same should be true about your artwork.
KR: Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?
JF: Yes. Often there is. I guess when I think about things like that, I think about this art critic named Arthur Dante, and he talks about this artist currating his exhibition. And the curator picks all of these paintings and they are all basically red squares. One of them is like an artifact from the Renaissance; it’s just a primed canvas. One of them is like an amateur painting; one of them is a masterpiece of supremist art. But they are all basically the same, they are all big red squares, and where they become different is their background. And to understand the background, gives you a clue to understanding the work. And so I think a lot of contemporary art is like that, even though they are called contemporary, to really understand it you need to know where it’s coming from. So when you label my work as Contemporary Indigenous Art that gives the viewer a clue to better understand the artwork.
Biography:Feddersen employs diverse materials and methods in creating his body of work. While some editioned prints exist, most pieces are distinctly unique. He regularly combines such techniques as stenciled relief, chine colle, monotype, and silagraphy.He is a long-standing faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. where he teaches printmaking and other contemporary art issues. He is a member of the Confederated Colville Tribes.
Several exhibits feature Joe Feddersen’s work:A Survey of Prints Since 1990, Froelick Gallery, Portland, Jan. 31 - Feb. 24, 2007.New Art of the West, 9, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis this exhibit closed Jan. 1.Northwest Biennial, Tacoma Art Museum, WA, Feb. 10 - May 6, 2007.Ancestral Patterns: Joe Feddersen & Gail Tremblay, American Indian Community House, New York, NY, Jan. 19 - Feb. 17, 2007.In 2003 Joe Feddersen’s work was featured in solo exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution/National Museum of the American Indian, and at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art—Willamette University in Salem.Resources:
http://chiaroscurosantafe.com/artists/86/
http://www.froelickgallery.com/Artist-Info.cfm?ArtistsID=235&Object=
http://fellowship.eiteljorg.org/#fellows::ArtistProfile?value=49
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Welcome to the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist Blog.
I suggested to William LePore, the Chair of the Department of Art at Portland State University, that I would like to teach classes focusing on topics about Contemporary Native art. To my delight he took me seriously and gave me the amazing opportunity to teach a class called “Contemporary Native American Art” during the winter term of 2010.
I was very nervous about teaching the course. My nervousness came from wanting to give adequate represent to my fellow Contemporary Native Artists and their work, while also trying to convey some issues related to Indigenous struggles both in the past and currently. Even if the Native artists’ works that we examined had nothing to do specifically with indigenous subjects, it seemed like the course could not function without an overview of Native and First Nation’s history.
While preparing for the course I considered several approaches to take, none of which really satisfied my desire to learn about these artists in very direct ways. So, I decided to employ the Internet to allow me to build my course around student engagement with Native Artists in person.
The first day of class I presented my idea to my fourteen students. I asked them if they would be interested in helping me build a blog that would archive student conducted, e-mail based interviews with Contemporary Native Artists. The general response was excitement with a bit of nervousness. I compiled a list of over fifty Native Artists and gave short presentations on each artist showing a few of their major works. Each student than picked an artist from the list to contact for the project.
The students had over six weeks to research the artist’s work, formulate questions for the interview, respond with a second round of questions, select images, and upload the final interview to the blog. All interviews except for one were conducted through e-mail. At the end of the student’s interviews I requested that they each ask their artists two of my own questions:
• Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?
• Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?
When making the blog I wanted to make sure not to exclude First Nations Artists. The course title was Contemporary Native American Art but many of the artists we researched are from Canada. So the blog title is an attempt to be as inclusive as possible: Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists, with the idea being to focus on contemporary art made by North American Indigenous artists regardless of subject matter.
It was an amazing ten-week process. The class met every Tuesday from 1-4:50pm. The students gave updates to the class about their interactions with their artists. Students would read their responses to the class and that would inspire conversations which might not ever have happened had the class been structured in a more traditional lecture format.
Throughout the process the students and I felt a range of emotions from excitement to suspense. One of the artists had a baby during the course of the interview and another artist was traveling throughout Asia. Knowing about these life events made the students feel more connected to their artists. On the final day each student gave an in depth presentation on each of their artist’s work and talked about some of the highlights during the interview process. I think the students were surprised to find that they can gain access to people they are interested in researching more easily than they thought. For the most part the experience was very positive and the students are proud to be providing the public with more information on contemporary Native Art.
I have gained great inspiration from this process and a feeling of community with the artists included in the project. I would like to thank all of my students for making this blog possible and all of the amazing, talented, and generous artists who participated with my students.
Wendy Red Star
Adjunct Professor
Department of Art
Portland State University
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