DURATION OF BEING KNOWN \\ Ishi Glinsky \\ Written By Kalyn Lisa Marie
Walking into P.P.O.W’s gallery in Tribeca, the room was bustling with patrons both inside and spilling outside where the cold was just beginning to remind us that fall is here. My brother, friend Sam, and I whipped off our jackets to meet the spirited room. A sea of chittering heads nearly blocked the view of huge vibrant paintings lining the walls of the rectangular room. We made our way left of the crowd to begin viewing the pieces. I had read previously that Ishi Glinsky (Tohono O’odham) was representing other Indigenous artists in his work, pulling from basket weaving and metalsmithing, but I was unprepared for the span of his pieces.
The room opens on the left predominantly with his oil and ink paintings, where tremendous pointed stacks of oil paint layer over one another like scales on a snake. The arrow-like scales fold around his paintings, molding themselves around the center focus and often with the most subtle gradient.
Where there is not an impressive amount of oil paint (that elicits a question of simply: how long must this take to dry?!) there are designs reminiscent of weavings. Thick sweeping strokes with brightly colored ink stains in between. It gives the paintings such drastic textural differences, I was compelled to see it from multiple angles. Seeking the natural shadow from the sheer weight of the paint.
Upon further exploration, we expand from his colorful painting world into fabrication, where steel structures are paying homage to his ancestry in the form of wire basket weaving, interlocking and curling just as they would with dried desert plants but here into a cartoon-ish “fight ball”. Hands fling out in the same characteristic way they do with the Looney Toons but made to resemble Hohokam shell carving style. We also see a lifesize inlay reproduction of the pink panther, another nod to Indigenous inlay workers such as Veronica Poblano (Zuni), who created the original as a bolo tie. See pic below.
With such devotion to other Indigenous folk and his own nations techniques and weaving characteristics, Glinsky has brought the original art forms back to the gallery world in a megalithic zoomed in reproduction.
Artbegets art, inspired by our ancestry. Perhaps as we move in contemporary Indigenous art spaces, we too can find our own ways to conceptualize the past, that does not have to adhere to the technique and creation before us, but instead, includes & honors it, as we grow.
Please seek out Ishi Glinsky as he traverses this exploration of ancestry and contemporary in Duration of being known at P.P.O.W. October 25 - December 7, 2024
Photo of Ishi Glinsky by Ruben Diaz
Light Pink Jazz V.P., 2024
aluminum, resin, pigment, wood, adhesive, foam
From Veronica Poblano (Zuni), the inspiration for “Light Pink Jazz” (above)
My Friend Fred, 2024
oil paint, oil stick, oil pastel, acrylic ink, matte medium on canvas