Us

How do we develop a critical eye in the face of beauty?

Poet Jennifer Elise Foerster collaborates with filmmaker Steven Yazzie to explore this question through an original poem in response to the Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism exhibition. Find statements by the artists and the written poem below.

Us I looked through her to a series of stacked gazes— bright angel shale, redwall limestone, a stab of sea floor vertically puzzled— to see the horizon from the other side— dust the color of crimson slippers where tread the caravan of our future selves. The river that carved a 6-million-year-old canyon is now dry, which means dead, according to the gravel. The note they left for us: one camel bone pushing up through the cracked earth. In the geometry of the future, they looked at me the same way we look at each other today— or would not look at me at all even when I positioned them in favorable light: the liquid gold of our planet’s only sun. What was it that I wanted—to testify? That I observed, in the ruins of our grand fountain, nothing of ourselves? I returned with the future’s burst palette on my shoes. Now even my shadow’s distended gait, twinned to my direction, I question. To make a new desert, they blew into a seed jar a desert. Became traders of recording devices, the rare, interplanetary beetle, paintings of us looking away. These were the most coveted. Which was real? A church of mud and lime crumbling back into its desert or the woman dancing in the plaza to the flute and click of rifles only I could hear. When she feels the warm sun, she closes her eyes, opens her shawl to a spill of turquoise stones. To them, we are ancient, and all the same, the subject and the artist both needle-pointed light. It turns out they remember most of what we are: strokes of emerald waters, sun-dried bricks of earth and straw, and always, figures in each of our private distances. In mine: a buffalo robe flapping on the back of a galloping horse. Beneath its hooves, the painter. She remembers a scene from her childhood— rushing for falling apricots. Then an incomprehensible emptiness, the fading, black-dyed leather of night. When the waters recede they will find us—stiffened bison, ivory eyes, panther’s gunmetal flash weathered by the distant crash of an ever-approaching army, our footprints— hollow corollas in the dunes. This is when I looked away— the moment before the woman, interrupting her study of drapery turns to the open window to see a man standing in the orange grove holding her decapitated head by her hair. This exactitude of loss I could never render. I was told the poet took leave of her collection, brought with her a dress of dark green foliage, a vessel of transparent water. The other took her skin, tipped with vermillion, to stretch, for light and sound, a drum. The children of the river were returned for auction while we formed a kind of vortex in our resting place— ladders leading to the windows of others. I am not the headless painter or the horse that crushed her. What can I tell you of what I have seen? It billows beyond the frame, white sheets to carry the wind.

Artist Statement

Jennifer Elise Foerster (Mvskoke)

Poetry, for me, is a suspension between the visible and the invisible—neither a representation of a thing nor a thing itself, but motion. I wanted to experience these paintings as a kaleidoscope of imagery, as motion.

As I scrolled from painting to painting, I wrote, at first, just one line per painting. The next round through, I lingered longer and wrote several lines of what I saw, thought about, remembered, and wondered. I found myself asking, who am I in relation to these paintings? I, too, come from a people (of the American Southeast) who were painted, drawn, written about for an audience of curious people who thought of us as “other.” These depictions too often served to affirm the authority of those holding power and propagated narratives that falsely justified the violence, deprivation, and dispossession of those made into the “other.” But I am also a traveler, a spectator, here, looking at these paintings as subjects for my own artmaking. So how could I be different from these painters who were practicing a form of “realism” yet also enacting a fantasy, affirming their own imaginary? What is my realism in my practice of looking? What is my imaginary?

Lines over layered lines I asked myselfwhy and how I was responding to the subjectsof this art—the peoples, cultures, places, lands, objects, and animals that were painted in our past and are now re-presented, rearranged, for this particular encounter in the Denver Art Museum, in 2023, with all that this time entails—our environmental crises, our social, economic, and political crises, and our urgent speculations of a future where the “we” must be reconceived.

After several rounds of writing lines in response to each of the paintings, I began the process of extraction, condensing, layering, erasure, looking for what the text revealed and for what the text concealed—looking for the realism in the imaginary; the imaginary in the realism.

Who are we, now, in our looking at one another, in our looking for another, as we look at our past, as we look to our future?

How do we separate ourselves, now, from the “us” of our past? From the “us” of our future? Which is the artist, and which the subject?

Ten pages of text became five pages of text, became four, became three. Each draft, different voices and images would emerge and blend and fracture. This is how the original paintings converged into a kaleidoscopic poem, and how each singular painting melded into a mosaic of conglomerate images that continued to change in the motion of the poem’s revision.

I arranged the poem into sections to create a new “gallery” of perceptions. The separation of the emergent poem into a series of smaller frames felt like a motion analogous to the motion of experiencing the array of paintings hanging in a gallery. Moments of life vibrating in a gallery are only apparently still, but throughout time and experience, and by each of our encounters, they become motion—the continuous flux that is the real.

To the other viewers of this exhibition, you, too, are artists of and within this motion, participants in this flux.

What art will you make in your looking, by your looking, and after your looking, about who we were, who we are now, and who we can become? What art will you make about us? What art will you make about a future us?

Jennifer Foerster (Mvskoke)
San Francisco
November 2022

Artist Statement

Steven J Yazzie

The beginning of most things comes from a story. The story in our case was delivered as an opportunity to help unpack the complications of history, of Western constructions and inventions of the “other,” or more specifically, how the “other” has been seen over time, both romanticized and idealized, perhaps a form of cultural baggage we all carry together.

Our story also began with the construction of words. Words from lines that were focused, then reconstructed and arranged until what emerged was the space between imagination and reality. These are the words of “Us,” a poem created by Jennifer Elise Foerster. The heartbeat of our story.

Early in the process I realized Jennifer’s methodology of extracting, condensing, layering, erasing, was similar to how artificial intelligence (AI) image generators create visual imagery. I learned about one of these AI generators, Midjourney, through a friend who also happens to work as a motion graphics artist. The two of us began our own process of creating imagery with AI for Jennifer’s words, finding ourselves in a new world of discovery.

Our process went as follows in creating the images:

  • Exhibition works were matched with sections of the poem and put into a storyboard.
  • Exhibition works were used as reference images for the AI algorithm, and the matching lines of poetry were used as the descriptive “prompts.”
  • Forty variations of AI-generated imagery were created for each reference work/poem line combination.
  • One image option was chosen and animated.
  • Animation frames were run through another AI generator, Stable Diffusion, with the same poem section as the prompt.
  • Sound was designed as an additional layer of the experience.

Beyond the process of image construction, our story seems to provide new questions. Many we cannot answer, nor should we. Our hope is not to define the strange beauty and unease one might feel while watching this video poem but rather to offer the viewer/visitor this work as an added dimension, a reflection of the exhibition, as Jennifer so clearly says in her artist statement, “Who are we, now, in our looking at one another, in our looking for another, as we look at our past, as we look to our future?”

Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Research for this exhibition was supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. It is presented with generous support from Keith and Kathie Finger, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Sotheby's, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.