Elisa Harkins: Teach Me a Song

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Elisa Harkins, "Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᏕᎫᏗ," 2019

performance still, Image courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Ian Byers-Gamber

Opening: November 21, 7pm 

Performance of Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᏕᎫᏗ: November 23, 3pm

Teach Me a Song Exhibition 

Western Front is excited to welcome artist and composer Elisa Harkins to present a series of songs and sculptures that build on her ongoing interests in translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. For this exhibition, Harkins’ first solo gallery exhibition, she presents a body of new work structured on a series of exchanges, wherein she invites collaborators to teach her a song. With the recordings of these songs, Harkins’ practice of nation to nation sharing and trading music is presented as a means of decolonizing traditions of Indigenous musicology. 

Harkins musical collaborators include: Mateo Galindo is a Tulsa, Oklahoma based media based artist and co-founder of the curatorial platform Atomic Cafe with Malinda Thurz-Gallindo. He works with Harkins on the song Sunpit, combining acoustic guitar and voice on a song that tells a narrative of a dystopian future, where families live underground and must travel to a specific “sunpit” to see the sun. Don Tiger is a Muscogee Creek language teacher and one of the last fluent speakers of Muscogee Creek. His song, titled No. 1 Sofke Sipper, incorporates acoustic guitar, drums and turtle shell shakers (locvs). Louis Gray is an Osage elder who was at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and in 1973 hitchhiked with his sister, Gina Gray to join the occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He teaches Elisa The AIM Song, an intertribal song that was adopted as the official AIM anthem.

Taking inspiration from the recording and sharing of this music, Harkins has fashioned three sculptures that links to each song. Working with various textiles, Harkins creates shawls, jackets and other garments that are installed on found stools and chairs, to hold up the finished clothing. Each of these sculptures stands as a performer in the gallery, individually voiced with a speaker, playing back the song associated with it. 

Artist Biography

Elisa Harkins is a Cherokee/Muscogee artist and composer originally hailing from Miami, Oklahoma. Harkins received her BA from Columbia College Chicago and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She has since continued her education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. Harkins uses the Muscogee and Cherokee languages, electronic music, sculpture, and the body as her tools. She has exhibited her work at documenta 14, The Broad Museum, The Gilcrease Museum, The Hammer Museum, Missoula Art Museum, MCA Chicago, and MOCA North Miami. Harkins is currently a mentor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow, and she is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe.

Performance Programming

Accompanying the work in the gallery, Harkins will be making a performance on Saturday, 23 November in Western Front’s Grand Luxe Hall. The performance is free and open to all ages. Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᏕᎫᏗ  is an ongoing project where Elisa Harkins sings in a combination of Cherokee, English and Muscogee Creek to electronic dance music, some of which is inspired by of sheet music of Indigenous music notated by Daniel Chazanoff during the 20th century.  As an act of Indigenous Futurism, it combines disco and Indigenous language in an effort to alter the fate of these endangered languages through active use. This iteration of Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᏕᎫᏗ,performed at Western Front, will include dancers Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and Zoë Poluch. 

Additionally, while Harkins is in Vancouver, she and collaborators Hanako Hoshimi-Caines and Zoë Poluch will be presenting their Elisa will also be performing Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ with Vancouver’s Plastic Orchid Factory on Sunday 24 November. Building on the same theme that are present in Harkins’ Wampum, Radio III is an indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance, and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called "neutrality." Details and tickets for this performance can be found at plasticorchidfactory.com. 

Performer Biographies

Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a dancer and choreographer based in Montréal. She is engaged with dance, performance making and philosophy as a way to see, feel and love better.

Zoë Poluch, originally from Canada, now based in Stockholm, Sweden, moves through different institutions and independent groupings dedicated to dancing and thinking choreography together.