Our ability to adapt to rapid complex social, cultural, physical and technological change reveals our strong sense of cultural tenacity and innate strategic desire to overcome even the most adverse conditions imposed upon us. Perhaps one of the most prevalent aspects is our longstanding fascination with popular culture and technology, and how we, as Aboriginal people, have adapted popular culture and technology into our own unique cultural aesthetic. In reference to my own Anishnaabe (Odawa) culture, our ability to transform glass beads into beautiful and complex geometric and floral motifs is an example. In my object-based work, I juxtapose traditional beadwork with reclaimed computer components, primarily resisters and flat ceramic capacitors to replicate the cultural transition.

A new age is once again infusing our cultures with new technology, and the pixel can be read as both a literal and metaphorical transformation of the glass bead. Within our urban environment, we are mapping out a new Indian cyber-territory. Our youth are borrowing and altering pop culture objects and infusing them with their own cultural aesthetic. This aesthetic continues to be informed by our past, and reflects our innate ability to translate our cultural aesthetic into new media of the present. There is also a longstanding cross- fertilization of pop culture between Native Americans and African Americans. Red Power and Black Power movements of the 1960s reveal an on-going impetus for change and fed the emergence of distinct pop cultural icons of the repressed inner city ghettos and urban reservations. Like rural reservations, urban isolation and segregation has become a hotbed of urban Indian pop cultural genres. Today, Native American youths are involved in all aspects of the visual, literary and performing arts. The street arts of Rap and Hip Hop are being “Indianized” while our Djs are mixing their own distinct brand of Indian pop culture. Within the inner cities, Native American youth are also using graffiti to codify and demarcate emerging urban tribal boundaries. Clothing and baseball caps are being infused with new iconography, while stereotypical imagery of the past is being reclaimed and infused with new meanings as significant cultural markers. My current body of work focuses on the development of Super Phat Nish as an icon of urban Indian pop culture. Drawing from Anishnaabe trickster Nanbush, Super Phat Nish also has the ability to transcend physical, abstract and spiritual realities. His ability to transform and transcend both time and space, and his shape-shifting phantasmagoria presence is often perceived as humorous, yet simultaneously his characters and antics are layered with multiple levels of meaning and code. Super Phat Nish has the ability to speak to all ages and intellects. His image is a conscious effort to reclaim stereotypical representations and portrayals of Indians, while acknowledging the emergence of an urban popular culture vernacular; “Super Phat” united with “Nish” (pronounced Knee-ch) a slang for Anishnaabe.

I situate Super Phat Nish in multiple urban activities, that one would not necessarily associate with Native Americans (as a DJ for example), and infuse his image on pop cultural objects used by urban Native American youth including skateboards, patches, satchels, hats, clothing and other urban pop culture objects. Super Phat Nish becomes the new cool urban guru and role model who reveals that one can maintain their distinct cultural sensibility in the city. This new body of work continues my ongoing documentation of Anishnabe cultural continuity and how our past continues to inform our future while challenging all preconceived notions of Anishnabe cultural stasis.

Copyright 2006 Barry Ace
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