Beaded letters, buttons, coyote teeth, horsehair, and sinew on thrifted leather jackets
The Potlatch Punk series is an ongoing collection of works about homage, memory, identity, and — as often as possible — using what’s available at hand to make works that become precious not solely through material, but through the investment put into them. The slow processes of beading and sewing are crucial in this respect. The jackets are modified and embellished by the blending of traditional materials with punk aesthetics, and are informed by Auntie YouTube in their discussions of Indigenous identity, resistance, and visibility, and their interrogations of wealth.
The Potlatch, simply explained, is about the redistribution of resources and treating guests well — all while honoring the reasons and people which gave rise to the gathering. This is acheived through song and dance, as well as the gifting of food and supplies, thus ensuring that the community is nourished in both body and mind. I use the punk jackets as templates to try to reconcile the many intersections of my own compounded identities and the varied relationships therein. The jackets are the regalia that I can create in the absence of the knowledge that belongs to me and ties me back to the people and lands that I belong to.
Using a mash-up of pop culture and counter-cultural and Indigenous citation, my work is fashioned through repeated attempts to discover unexpected confluences and malaphors: of both punk perimeters and de-evolutions, and in a spirit of ceremony and resistance. The work seeks the places where mistranslations and misunderstandings in identity can be deliberately highlighted. In this way, the jackets are pieced together, gathered and reconstructed into their own beings, worked into their own distinct legibility while remaining part of a larger whole.
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Whess Harman (they/them pronouns) is a Carrier Wit’at/mixed race, trans (ftn) indigiqueer. They earned a BFA from Emily Carr University in 2014. Their interdisciplinary work in text, textiles, poetry, and curation seeks to explore the possibilities of reciprocal engagement in dialogue and the labor of creating community. They make zines about dating (badly), queer and trans identity, and are also sporadically writing and drawing a comic called cryboy
about over-emoting spirits and queerness in a post-apocalyptic future. They currently live on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, where they work as a curatorial intern at grunt gallery. They co-curated the Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities 2SQ/Indigiqueer Symposium with Kali Spitzer, and function as the de-facto editor of Together Apart Zine.