Artist Profile: Apay’uq
Artist Profile: Apay’uq
In understanding indigenous feminist responses to social and political change, Artist Apay’uq is a Yup’ik activist, utilizing her beautifully poignant paintings to critique colonial and capitalistic extraction. In her 2011 painting, Our Agreement, Apay’uq references her personal experiences with pregnancy and its alignment with the features of the Natural world surrounding her. Her womb parallels the shape and vitality of the salmon beside it, with its and her face nearly meeting, beaming at each other in their mutual acknowledgment. The salmon’s tail and the woman’s hand, veined with blood, are meant to represent a mutualism through their provision and evocation of life, and in the beneficence that salmon–in its form as food–brings to human wellbeing. When interviewed, the artist provided an accompanying slogan for the painting, through the words: “I will nourish your future generations, as long as you protect mine.” (Auslander, 2020)
(Auslander, 2020)
Apay’uq accompanies this symmetry and depiction of Indigenous Knowledge–understanding the vital flows between the human and nonhuman realms–with her call to resistance against capitalistic invasion, specifically in her outcry against the building of Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay. Her piece, “Understanding Wealth,” challenges conceptions of the mine’s “necessity” through its provision of jobs and economically-inclined wealth to the area, calling to light the simultaneous erasure of subsistence fisheries and damage to indigenous ecosystems. Real, meaningful conceptions of “wealth,” to the artist, come through the acknowledgement, respect, and celebration of life, represented through the salmon lodged and swimming within this painted figure’s wallet.
(Auslander, 2020)
In an interview, the artist pointedly speaks out against Pebble Mine’s installation due to its effects, in addition to stating her perspectives on kinship and its relation to land erasure. Apay’uq discusses how these mine builds “...[destroy] our relationships with each other and our environment. If we feed our land and water toxic mining waste, that is what we will be eating too.” (Apayuq.com, 2019) The intimacy of the artist’s paintings, blending celebrations of human and nonhuman interactions, represent an important emotionally fluid political representation of resistance, in calling to question what we truly value and preserve as a society.
Lillian Worley
