Night Music of the Southern Plains American Indian

This project presents various aspects of Young’s creative practice as it stretches across continuums of sound, art, and religious freedoms/traditions. Active as video director, editor, performer, and object/installation maker, Young created multiple performances and installations for the galleries. He collaborated with renowned southern plains Native American drum group, Southern Thunder, to perform and film a selection of songs performed at post-pow-wow after parties known as 49’s. We believe this to be the first time 49 songs and dance have been presented within a contemporary art expression. Young’s interest in subculture, symbology, and hierarchies manifest in re-presenting a severely-used Ford Ranger as a critical drum object, a gallery installation of hand-built moon-form reliefs, and a closing performance of event scored drone music co-opting the same Ford Ranger. The multi-colored moon reliefs are sourced from the personal, familial, and cultural significance of the Native American Church, a.k.a. Peyotism. Moon-form altars are created from sand/dirt within tipis during Native American Church ceremonies. Similar multi-colored symbols appeared in and across his childhood. As finale, Young guided a workshop to create an event score to be performed at the closing evening. His drone styled music explores sonic compression, fragmenting, recording, and loudness, waterfalling them into sonic, poetic, expressions. Young parses elements of his life and histories in the interest of canonical reshelving, as his creative acts share, promote and investigate sound, ritual, right life, and community activism.

Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is a multidisciplinary artist and composer working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art and experimental and improvised music. Nathan’s work often engages the spiritual and the political and re-imagines indigenous sacred imagery in order to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. Nathan is a founding and former member for the artist collective Postcommodity (2007-2015). He holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts and his bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Oklahoma. He is an active member of the Delaware, Pawnee, and Kiowa tribes.