This was by far my most favorite assignment of the semester. I was able to bring in my prints and beadwork and continue experimenting with the things that I have been since I came to grad school, and I was about to learn a new process that may influence how I show my thesis in Fall25. I wish that I had had a way of hanging things so that I could have brought in my more three dimensional pieces, I think having my full sized paper shawl being projected on would have been a really amazing thing and I could have pulled out some old tricks that I had learned in premier pro during my undergrad to play around with that. Overall though, I'm fairly happy with what I made. I've talked about how my family all has birds, so I was able to bring my sister into the piece (twice if you include the video) and my mother is front and center though she is very hidden by the projection on the larger weaving piece.

I struggled the most with the performance aspect of the assignment because I simply don't do that with my work. As someone who looks white and makes work about being Indigenous, I already have a hard time standing next to my work because I'm always worried someone is going to call me a Pretendian or they would make the joke that maybe my great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess. I was stumped on that part for a really long time until I realized I could kind of cheat the system if I shared a video of me dancing at my annual family Powwow in Georgia.

The video is from 2023 when my sister finally came to the powwow again and she's the one in the purple shawl that interrupts my mother and I and actually makes me go off beat toward the end of the video. But my mother, sister, and I are all dancing Gourd dance, it is a Kiowa dance (many people argue with that statement, but I will always consider it Kiowa) where we spend time honoring our ancestors, our warriors, and the people who are still here. The women always dance behind the men and we move differently depending on how fast the beat of the drum is going. At my family Powwow, we always do it on the second day, early in the day because the women are in full regalia and are wearing their shawls and people have most certainly passed out during this dance in the Georgia heat before.

I'm glad that I was able to project it on the fringe and have it slightly distorted rather than sitting flat onto a print or my beadwork panel that I included, it made the video so much more interesting to people who might not have a clue of what was going on in the video. But the next time I use the program I think I want to have a much larger installation style piece to really see what all mad mapper can do.