Andrea Geyer

Lives and works in
(b. 1971, Freiburg, Germany; Lives and works in New York) Andrea Geyer digs into the complexities of narrative and imagery to consider how they become solidified into history and art. Her series Spiral Lands concerns history’s tendency to repeat itself. Created at a time when American exceptionalism was coloring the invasion of Iraq, for Geyer, the rhetoric justifying the invasion was reminiscent of that of manifest destiny. A work in three parts, Spiral Lands / Chapter 2, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, replicates an educational setting: slides of Chaco Canyon and Bandelier National Monument click by as a lecture is continuously broadcast over speakers. The voice-over lecture displaces single authorship with a multitude of voices—Native and non-Native alike. Spiral Lands / Chapter 3, represented here by one work in the series, is comprised of text and images. The text, by Acoma Pueblo poet Simon J. Ortiz, is deeply personal: the poems concern the experiences of Indigenous people now.