I make art as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and a consumed narrative without absolutes. - Natalie Ball
The Verbier 3-D Foundation is pleased to announce Native American artist Natalie Ball as our 2020 artist-in-residence. Continuing in the 5th year of the Verbier 3-D Foundation’s climate and glacial project, the artist will be invited to live in the deep Swiss Alps to consider current debates around climate change and the topic of WATER.
Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in New Zealand at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral homelands to raise her three children.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally: Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Te Manawa Museum, NZ; Half Gallery, NY; Portland Art Museum, OR; Museum of Contemporary Native Art (MoCNA), NM; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and SculptureCenter, NY. Natalie attained her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018.
Currently, I am exploring gesture and materiality to create sculptures as Power Objects. I offer my objects as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and consumed narrative and identity, without absolutes. I believe historical discourses of Native Americans have constructed a limited and inconsistent visual archive that currently misrepresents our past experiences and misinforms current expectations.
I excavate hidden histories, and dominant narratives to deconstruct them through a theoretical framework of auto-ethnography to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses in order to build a visual genealogy that refuses to line-up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans.
My goal is, for my art to lend itself as new texts, with new histories, and new manifestations, to add to the discussion of complex racial narratives that are critical to further realizing the self, the nation, and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories.
