Eric-Paul Riege
b. 1994, Gallup, New Mexico
Lives in Gallup, New Mexico
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Eric-Paul Riege’s massive textile installation titled + (pronounced like the Navajo/Diné lower-case “t”) resulted from a collaboration with the materials at play. Riege responded to the wool, cotton, and polyester materials he used, employing them to their fullest potential to create a sacred structure that calls in his ancestors. The artist remarked of the making of this piece that such a labor-intensive process is guided by his hands knowing what to do before his mind does, revealing the way in which making is a form of learning. The artist animates his art as he creates it, giving it charge through his labor and his bodily and personal connections to it. Seeing the work as constantly evolving, he also activates it in the gallery space—four cloaks placed on the backs of eight-legged sheep will be donned by the artist at the close of the exhibition, allowing him to become enveloped in the fibrous materials and invigorated by the piece and the spirits called to it.
A mixture of natural and synthetic materials, the plush, eight-legged sheep—each kept within eight vertically hung soft “stalls”—look out from the center, suggesting their interaction with visitors. They pay homage to the animals from which their materials are taken as well as to the spider, which, in Navajo/Diné mythology, is the original weaver of this planet and teacher of this sacred tradition. The structure forms a cross, referencing the four cardinal directions, a means of diagramming and making tangible history, self, and world. At the center hangs an enlarged, soft pendant earring. Meant to be worn by the gods, the pendant also honors jewelers and craftspeople as memory makers and culture bearers. Combining the playful and the spiritual, the physical and the non-material, this structure embodies the artist’s worldview informed by and in reverence for his Navajo/Diné heritage and the natural world within a lineage of textile and craft practitioners.
about the artist
Working across media, with an emphasis on woven sculpture, wearable art, and durational performance, Eric-Paul Riege and his work celebrates hózhó, the worldview fostered by Diné, or Navajo, and its bearing on everyday experience. It is a philosophy encompassing beauty, balance, goodness, and harmony in all things physical, mental, and spiritual. His practice narrates his personal history and the rituals and traditional stories of his ancestors, while paying homage to generations of weavers in his family. Riege’s work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019), and at the 2018 SITElines Biennial, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He earned a BFA in Studio Art and Ecology from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 2017.
Eric-Paul Riege, +, 2021. Mixed fibers, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks