New Red Order: Crimes Against Reality
Curated by Adán De La Garza + Jenna Maurice
Exhibition Dates: July 1 - Aug 27 @ Redline
Reception: July 29th 6-10pm
New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit). In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labor to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource. New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that 'plays Indian'—calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency. Working with an interdisciplinary network of informants the NRO co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront settler colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth.
"New Red Order: Crimes Against Reality" examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples, lands, and ways of life. NRO provocatively questions how these desires can be channeled into something productive, sustainable, and transformative.
Through a series of video works, this exhibition invites viewers to critically engage with the complexities of settler colonialism, cultural appropriation, and enacting of indigenous futures. NRO seeks to dismantle the illusions that uphold the status quo, urging viewers to question the construction of reality and the power dynamics that underpin it. By engaging with the works on display, visitors are invited to reflect on their own complicity, challenge established norms, and forge new paths towards the rematriation of all Indigenous land and life.
“Our aim is to transcend the guilt and shame, not to remove and thus
get over it, but to imagine something through and beyond that can address and promote Indigenous futures.”
Featured Videos
Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality
9 mins, 2-channel HD video, sound
Crimes Against Reality focuses on two public sculptures by James Earle Fraser — End of the Trail (1894), a statue originally intended to be installed on the California coast at the scale of the Statue of Liberty, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in 2022 — both of which commemorate the origin myth of America.
Never Settle: The Program
50 mins, HD video, sound
Never Settle: The Program is a promotional initiation video which simultaneously satirizes and sincerely engages with solidarity and the desire for Indigenous epistemologies, luring inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation.
Give It Back: Stage Theory
6.5 mins, HD video, sound
Give it Back: Stage Theory’s point of departure is the détournement of Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (1850), an 9 foot tall 348 foot long proto-cinematic moving panorama commissioned by and based on the contemporaneous notes and drawings of amateur archaeologist and glorified grave robber Montroville W. Dickeson — who spent 12 years of his life traveling the Mississippi River and digging up Indigenous burial mounds. Moving panoramas were a popular form of entertainment during the 19th century, like the Saturday matinees of the early 20th century or the virtual reality experiences of today. Originally presented at The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, the panorama toured from town to town, accompanied by music, dramatic light effects, and a sensational narration by Dickeson himself. Give it Back: Stage Theory represents the panorama with new narration and music, transforming it into a LandBack rave urgently advocating for the rematriation of all Indigenous land and life.