Joe Feddersen Comments on Contemporary Indigenous Issues Through Geometric Abstraction

At first glance, the woven works in Joe Feddersen: Urban Drama, running until July 25 at Chicago’s Volume Gallery, look just like the “sally bags”—cylindrical baskets that tribes on the Columbia Plateau in the Pacific Northwest decorate with symbols of tribal belief and history and use for gathering herbs—of the artist’s Colville ancestors. 

A closer look reveals how cleverly and masterfully Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan) is adapting tradition. The little human images on one basket resemble ancient petroglyphs, but some look suspiciously like spacemen or 1980s video-game characters. A zig-zag pattern on another is somehow both geometrical abstraction and one of the giant transmission towers for power lines that crisscross Native lands. One basket is crowded with figures and oblong shapes—petroglyph people carrying protest signs.

This artist, who now lives in his hometown of Omak, Washington, after decades of teaching at Evergreen State College in Olympia, underlines the fact that Indigenous people are contemporary people, facing contemporary challenges to their lifeways with resilience and humor. In the process, he is creating works of technical mastery and spiritual power. 

As a part of the painstaking weaving process, Feddersen makes the images with thread. “He’s not creating these patterns on graph paper and then rendering them,” says Claire Warner, co-owner of Volume Gallery. “He truly is going into what he calls the labyrinth. It’s almost a spiritual practice, or a prayer, where the figures are unveiling themselves as he goes.”