University of Arizona
Arizona Arts
College of Fine Arts - School of Art

School of Art Galleries

It’s Not What it Looks Like

Works (in order of gallery):

 “It’s Not What it Looks Like” from Siksikiinglish: Because You Do Not Have the Language to Read This…
Medium: digital collage series
Year: 2020

Marrow Morning
Medium: 9 minute video 
Year: 2020

Raven Moffett

Statement:
As a third culture, biracial and diasporic ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ/ white queer artist I carry my home and community inside me as memories. Those before me live in the marrow of my bones which will beget those who come after. My skin and dreams tell me stories and help me remember. My first memory is of a story, as all memories will become.

By exploring embodied storytelling through the externalization of experience, memory and trauma, my work investigates the liminal, fluid identities that I occupy. Operating in photographic and time-based media, I disrupt the absolutist violence cameras have perpetuated as tools which fabricate “truths” and serve as authorities of memory to uphold dominant historical narratives. I incorporate found imagery (mining the public and familial archives), layered with process marks (remnants of literal chemistry or digital tools), and performative and constructed images to heal trauma through re-memory. 

 
Statement for Morrow Mourning: “Marrow Mourning” is meant to disturb and inform its audience about the painful rending of bodily connections to land, community, ceremony, and each other that Indigenous womxn must constantly struggle against settler colonial oppression to maintain connection to themselves and their communities. Illustrated through interactions of a mother and daughter literally carving space for themselves within the land and found footage from the current Wet’su’eten land defender struggle, “Marrow Mourning” is a painful meditation on Indigneous resilience against continued colonial occupation of Native land. 
 
Statement for Siksikiinglish: Because You Do Not Have the Language to Read This… : ᓱᖽᐧᖿ (Siksiká) is the language of my mother’s people, the ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ (Niitsitapi). I mine the archive of my family photos (both my ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ and white―mother’s and father’s―sides) to layer, collage, and merge with a public archive of my people (Google image results for “Blackfeet beadwork”). I illustrate the complex layers of identity, referencing a non-linear approach to familial connection through editing devices, processes, platforms, and programs made evident in the inclusion of their marks. Each image tells a story, enmeshed in a convergence of different times, various media, and a mixing of visual language, which functions as a singular bead in a string of beadwork that illustrates my family’s experiences.