John Feodorov: The Present Moment

John Feodorov Gods of Industry, 2020. Oil on canvas, 64 x 68 inches.

Overview:
Of mixed Navajo (Diné) and Euro-American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California in the city of Whittier, just east of Los Angeles. During his early life, he and his family made annual visits to his grandparent’s land on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. The time he spent there continues to influence his work.
 His Diné mother converted to Jehovah's Witness when he was two years old.  His father was Russian, so he was aware from an early age of the different perspectives in belief systems. This lends his acute art an edge of sarcasm as well as absurdity. The present work, completed during our current crises follows closely on his series Desecrations discussed below.

John Feodorov: The Covid19 pandemic broke here in Seattle as I began working on this painting. The imagery feels like a summary of what has been happening in this country for the last few years: border wall, pipeline expansion, the rolling back of environmental policies, a growing sense of helplessness, and of course, the current pandemic. Even the rainbow is absent of color and is stopped at the border. This painting is merely a reflection of my ongoing concerns. It is not dystopic futurism, but a response to what is happening now. While I may be criticized for not creating hopeful visionary art in the midst of such conditions, I would counter that the silhouette of the coyote In the foreground actually is hopeful. Though a phantom, it still survives despite everything that is happening around it as it exits the confines of the frame.

Susan Platt: John Feodorov often examines disjunctions and destructions. With the added lens of the Corona Virus epidemic Gods of Industry continues on the subject of  his 4 part  Descecrations, recently acquired by the Seattle Art Museum. Descecrations addresses the despoliation of Indigenous reservations through coal and oil extraction, pipe lines, and uranium mining. He painted the images on specially woven white Navaho rugs created by Navaho master weaver Tyra Preston.

Feodorov explained that as he painted on the rugs, he felt he also was committing an act of desecration, even though they were created for him specifically to use for his paintings.

“The series responds to ongoing environmental threats to traditional Diné lands and communities (including toxic pollution caused from uranium mining, coal burning, and fracking), as well as the exploitation and pollution of indigenous land around the world. But, it also refers to my hesitation in painting upon Tyra’s beautiful weavings.

 “Just as Native lands are under constant threat, so are Native cultures. For me, these rugs act as metaphors for both land and culture. By painting upon them, perhaps I have also desecrated them? My mother taught me that weaving is a sacred art, taught to our Diné people by Spider Woman. So it was with some hesitation and great respect that I decided to undertake this series. Understandably, Tyra asked many probing questions of me before agreeing to participate, as well as consulting with a Navajo elder/medicine man from her community. I wish to thank Tyra Preston for weaving these gorgeous rugs, without which this series could not have been realized.”

 no 1 The Coal Plant

 no 2 The Pipelines

No 3 The Yellow Radiation House

No 4 Fracking Cracks in the Earth

The reverence that the artist expresses toward  the weaver of the rugs corresponds to the deep respect that native people feel as they understand our connections to the land, to all living creatures, and to community, understandings that are deeply embedded in their psyches, but not understood by our profit driven society. Those connections are being severed by the virus as much as by extractions. In fact, the virus is clearly the result of the same disruptions, but now that disruption is inside our bodies. But since mainstream science sees humans as separate from nature, it does not accept that tearing apart the earth leads to breakdown of our bodies. Certainly our scientists are accepting that they understand little of what is happening with the virus, perhaps a step forward to thinking about our bodies in different ways, thinking about our bodies as part of the larger disruptions of the planet, The painting includes  the arbitrary walling off of an invented border that does not exist for birds, animals, plants and humans, only for nativist politicians. 

The assumption, that it is possible to actually understand and control the workings of the planet and the human body, is now in question. Feodorov's human heads, one that sucks oil, the other spills it out of his head, even as he wears a mask, is set in a desolate lifeless landscape in which only the shadow of a coyote survives.

Here is Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, Onondaga Six Nations, " We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of creation ... and we stand somewhere between the mountain and the ant. Somewhere and only there as part and parcel of creation." ("A Call to Consciousness on the Fate of Mother Earth," Indian, Fall 2007 .)

Mark Auslander: As the artist notes, Coyote in the lower right quadrant of the painting breaks through the frame of "Gods of Industry", and this act of visual transgression does seem to be the most hopeful and encouraging aspect of the work.  In violating the frame, Coyote, the ambiguous trickster hero of Dine (Navajo) mythology, manifestly counteracts the soul-crushing constraint of Trump's wall, which aligns with the left hand frame of the picture. As Susan notes, the overall image evokes a world deeply out of balance, as Mother Earth has been ravaged  by extractive industries, including fracking and uranium mining; the viral pandemic can be understood as a symptom of these broader, systemic patterns of environmental degradation. The gray stalks descending from the above into the ground  can be seen as pipelines carrying the fruits of hydrofracking, a technology that forces water into the earth to extract petrochemical resources, poisoning aquifers and posing risks of oil spills on vulnerable lands and waterways. We could equally be witnessing in this stalks the invasive protein spikes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus penetrating a human cell, hijacking its internal mechanisms to transform it into a factory generating new pathogenic strands of RNA, that will in turn invade thousands of other cells. In this sense, Feodorov's title, "Gods of Industry," may refer equally to rapacious corporate CEOs and the novel coronavirus itself.

Coyote here seems, as befits a trickster, to take on protective coloration, sharing the same shadowy black color as the oil spill, the visible scar in the body of Mother Earth.  Yet one senses  that Coyote's exuberant, restless imagination, so often celebrated in Navajo storytelling, may transcend the routine, regularized modes of conventional thinking: at a dark and profoundly troubling moment in history,  Coyote might just blaze a trail in a thoroughly unexpected fashion, across a battered land, taking us all to a better place.