Wendy Red Star and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Monsters (video still), 2018. VR video, 4 minutes. Collection of the artist Wendy Red Star.
Alumna Amelia Winger-Bearskin (MFA in Studio Art, 2008) is an artist, community organizer, and Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing a 360 video story with artist Wendy Red Star about Native American Monsters, which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. The piece is currently exhibited at New Jersey’s Newark Museum as the centerpiece of Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, on view until June 16, 2019.
Vogue recently reviewed the exhibition and interviewed Red Star, describing the video work Sweat Lodge, co-created with Winger-Bearskin,
...we stepped inside to see not the inside of a sweat lodge, or what I had imagined the inside of this work to be, but a 360-degree film made by Red Star and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist and organizer who works with cultural communities and counts herself among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma. (Winger-Bearskin is also the founder of Stupid Hackathon, which is, on a less cerebral level, awesome. See: “artisanal Snapchat filter.”) When you sit down in Sweat Lodge, you look around to see Red Star’s home on the Crow Reservation, and while we watched the video as it looped, Red Star herself pointed out landmarks from her childhood. “Those are the Pryor Mountains,” she said at one point. When the video took the viewer almost underground into a panorama of sandstone depressions, Red Star said, “When I was a kid, we would play hide-and-seek in there.”
After the Newark Museum, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth will travel to Arizona State University.