Eric-Paul Riege, “ojo|-|ólǫ́”
- Democracy Chain
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
by T.s. Flock
Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
Continuing through October 25, 2026
What still distinguishes museums from privately owned galleries is the possibility, fragile and ever-threatened, of a non-transactional encounter with objects, in which value is understood in terms of intensity of attention and depth of experience. If museums can still lay claim to any form of legitimacy beyond their being levers of aesthetic ideology and intellectual speculation, it resides in their capacity to slow down the incessant flow of produced meaning and to resist the human compulsion to transform everything first into a sign, and then into an asset.
Museums may also claim legitimacy as archives for research, but this assumption lacks examination of the objectivity of the archival impulse — that compulsion to collect, preserve, and catalog. Whether devoted to fine art or to natural history, the museum is a theater where history is written through the arrangement of displays, systems of classification, and especially by what is omitted. That is imperial ideology in its purest form.
This critique is key to the intellectual framing of Eric Paul Riege in his show “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (pronounced oh-ho hol-ohn). But the real substance of the show is its emotional core and its sense of humor. It is a delicate tour de force that centers the human element (contact, mark-making, intimacy, and openness) while still engaging in incisive critique.
Riege’s large-scale soft sculptures include finished arrangements and more modular pieces that can adapt to the setting. For instance, in one chamber you have a monumental pair of “earrings” titled “jaatłoh4Ye’iitsoh.” Earrings carry a great deal of significance in Diné culture as markers of identity, heritage and connection to other planes. In the chamber across the hall, a series of oversized Concha belts titled “ayo sis’ 8” hang in a row. These were made from abysmally bad reproductions of Concha motifs printed on shower curtains that Riege found online.
The most salient example of Riege’s use of modularity is in a nearby chamber that is challenging to curate because it connects to the small opening room of the exhibit, a chained-off staircase to the museum’s lower levels, a hall to the rest of the exhibition space, and a door that leads to James Turrell’s skyspace, “Light Reign” via a small outdoor bridge. From the chamber’s high domed ceiling Riege has suspended a long sculpture, “yoo’4yay,” composed from many different elements of his formal vocabulary (balls, discs, cylinders). It feels very much at home there.
I use those words “at home” cautiously, and somewhat ironically, because a museum is never truly a home. It is either a place of circulation or a grave. In the United States, indigenous artists bear an additional critical weight in this relationship. Their history is not merely that of a bygone past as imperial record would prefer it to be, but of a present still haunted by ongoing displacement and erasure that they continue to resist.
As is necessary, strategies differ from one indigenous artist to another. Some, such as Duane Linklater, adopt a conceptual rigor, dissecting the very structures of museum-based knowledge. There are those, such as Nicholas Galanin, who choose irony, turning institutional codes back upon themselves, and those — Demian Deinéyazhi comes to mind — who strike with critical directness, refusing any form of mediation. Rare is the retort capable of combining humor, intellectual generosity, and firmness — a stance that yields neither to cynicism nor to complacency. This is the precise and beautiful balance struck by Riege in “ojo|-|ólǫ́.”
Cultural destruction manifests in layers, in nuances, and in contradictions. Like any profound violence, it distorts the one who wields it just as much as the one who must endure it. Riege’s heart-centered approach seeks to liberate everyone in this dynamic. That precludes a hierarchical attitude in favor of humor and hospitality. Viewers are thus encouraged to touch and interact with sculptures in certain rooms. So bringing it back to the idea of an artwork “being at home,” if it feels more that way, it’s because we are also permitted to feel more at home.
Deeper in the exhibition, there is a room featuring a video that becomes a pivot for these various ideas through an unlikely medium: home shopping. Riege was inspired by the appearance of QVC hostesses displaying jewelry by Navajo artisans, or at least plagiarized from them. As mentioned above, such objects are treated as ornamental rather than aesthetic, and it was macabre to see cultural symbols being hawked in a manner that was at once precious and detached.
In the video, Riege is dressed in regalia referencing the Navajo deity Spider Woman, the spiritual ancestor of all weavers, as it was from her that they first learned how to weave. Riege channels Vanna White more than Spider Woman, laying objects out and then sweeping them away with theatrical gestures on a table-cum-altar. In the galleries on the opening weekend, Riege enacted a durational performance in the same attire, interacting with looms and the soft sculptures in the gallery in a much clearer embodiment of his spiritual great-great-etc-grandmother.
Too often, the gravity of such subjects crushes any attempt at lightness. Riege’s audacity reveals humor as a way to disarm certainties, to carve out openings within the dominant discourse rather than to escape into frivolity. This apparent benevolence in no way diminishes the strength of his convictions; on the contrary, it renders them more penetrating and more difficult to dismiss.
The regalia worn in the video and performance is what is first seen as we enter the exhibition. It faces a large reproduction of a weaving comb, “bee adzooí — 11 toes,” rendered in imitation leather. The title refers to a Diné myth linking extra digits to the weaving tradition. Riege comes from a long line of weavers and was also born with eleven toes. The tradition proscribes leaving one’s comb stuck in an unfinished work, and that brings us to an affecting story Riege told during the press tour.
When looking through the gallery archives, Riege found an unfinished woven work with the comb still embedded in it. This is not something that would have arrived in the collection voluntarily; one need not be an animist who believes that all things contain a spirit to understand the gravity of this. Like the pathos inspired by seeing skeletons lying beside each other in Pompeii, this became an unintended funerary object, seized from its context and its creator, now assuredly long gone. This was an object of devotion turned into evidence of violence in such a banal fashion that no one had really noticed it before.
So yes, our institutions transform care into symbolic capital, curiosity into posturing, and attention into an exploitable resource. The ideologies behind the institution dictate the rules of the game that curators and artists must play, no matter how sincere they may be.
A radical modesty is both an appropriate and a subversive response in a world obsessed with hierarchy. It calls for a shift in the locus of authority, moving it away from the power to consecrate and toward the capacity to connect and to care without overdetermining meaning. Above all, it must emphasize belonging with over belonging to.
Nothing should feel at home in a museum, but artists like Riege at least use such a platform as a stage to welcome us back home to each other and to the pure impulse to create — not archive — because we simply cannot survive without each other in a world devoid of the meanings we determine together.
T.s. Flock is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle.
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