Terran Last Gun, “Celestial Observations”
- Democracy Chain
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
by David S. Rubin
Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles
Continuing through July 11, 2026
As an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation, Santa Fe-based Indigenous artist Terran Last Gun has developed a unique meditative drawing practice for exploring his spirituality, paying tribute to his heritage, and pursuing his interest in abstract art of the 1960s. Specifically, Last Gun builds upon the legacy of Native American ledger art, a process of drawing over old financial records that emerged among the Plains tribes in the mid-19th century, and which continues to this day. His father, Terrance Guardipee, is himself a well-known ledger artist who perpetuates the practice of drawing representational narratives on pages from record books once kept by traders, missionaries, soldiers, and other non-Indigenous peoples.
While honoring his father through his own work as a ledger artist, Last Gun essentially reinvents the format by replacing figuration with abstraction. Recognizing stylistic parallels between the geometric symbols that represent landscape and celestial forms on Piikani painted lodges (also known as tipis) and the circular and triangular forms that appear in artworks by some of his favorite geometric abstract painters, Last Gun has evolved a hybrid visual language that fuses both traditions.
“Celestial Observations” turns to a format that was favored among systemic artists such as Sol LeWitt or Josef Albers: organizing geometric configurations into modular grids. Whereas LeWitt would vary shape and Albers would shift colors from one unit to the next, Last Gun repeats the same image and color scheme in most of his compositions in recognition of its potential symbolism, which he considers somewhat open-ended. In “Gathering of Distinguished Knowledge Holders” (2025) he positions sixteen identical symbols into four evenly spaced rows, with each unit made up of a square divided into four squares, and which is itself set within another square. The number four has significance within the framework of Indigenous history because it can refer to the four directions, seasons, stages of life, or ceremonial cycles. Combined with the reference to Piikani traditions that is inherent to the ledger paper itself, the geometric pattern — which also brings to mind a blanket or a quilt — affirms the artist’s ties to his lineage, but with a contemporary sensibility rooted in modernist abstraction.
The remaining works are presented as diptychs, triptychs, or four-module polyptychs, all of which have precedent in traditional religious art. A particularly outstanding example is “Another Human Being Experience: Magnificent Cosmic Source of Life” (2025), the only work where Last Gun alternates between two color schemes. It proves to be a tactic that yields a dynamic optical energy signifying the life source referenced in the title. Here he has appropriated two of the most familiar geometric formats from the paintings of Kenneth Noland, the chevron at the top and the target at the bottom of each section. The truncation of these configurations at the drawings’ edges suggests that they could be part of a larger, inferentially expansive universe. Additionally, the artist equates the semi-circles in the lower sections with the shape of lodge covers when they are laid flat.
In another series, where variations of circles interact with stripes our squares, Last Gun pays tribute to Leon Polk Smith, a kindred spirit in that Smith was of Cherokee ancestry. Polk Smith’s “Constellation Paintings” (1967-73), multi-panel arrangements of ovoid-shaped canvases, have recently been reinterpreted in terms of Indigenous culture. In Piikani traditions, the circle is considered a sacred form, as it is the basis for social and ceremonial activities.
Last Gun’s circular drawings convey their sense of spiritual power through an intensity of color, as seen in “Entering a Powerful Lodge” (2026), where a red-and-blue four-square motif is set within a deep yellow circle, and “Discovering New Realms of Imagination” (2026), where the deep yellow contrasts strikingly with a vibrant magenta. The latter work is also animated by the diagonal positioning of its three components together with the rightward rotation of the ledger paper, so the handwritten text becomes an abstract compositional element.
Philosophically, Last Gun is most closely aligned with the prewar Transcendental Painting Group, which he embraces as a major influence, as well as with artists like the Beat Generation master Bruce Conner. All of these plains and mountains experimentalists demonstrated that artmaking can be a fulfilling means to connect spiritually with the cosmos. Last Gun thus sustains a deep-rooted proto-American spirit.
David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.
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