Face the Past, Face the Future, 2025
Neon on wood panels

‘Face the Past, Face the Future’ opens the ‘This is Native Land’ exhibition with two sets of neon signs directing the viewer to alternate paths through which they may interpret the exhibit. This artificial choice mimics a linear sense of time. The exhibit, like time itself, is more complicated than a straight line. It curls around us, diverges and repeats. While much of ‘history’ is fixated on making the past finite, these signs are an invitation to look for a future in the stories of the past. This exhibition is asking viewers to face a difficult and painful history, to “confront past genocidal actions and how they were integral to the forming of Washington State”. The course we are on was not inevitable and the artwork could be read as a familiar warning, if we do not face this past, it might also become our future.There is another way to interpret the signs. The faces include a sly lip point, a gesture that nudges toward each side, as if to say, whether you look to the past or the future, the conclusion is the same, ‘This is Native Land.’

Commissioned by the Washington State History Museum

This is Native Land, Washington State History Museum, Tacoma, WA