“… and if near a lake, the semi-human cry of the loons at their unearthly revels. “ - Henry David Thoreau
There’s a legend in the Ojibwe culture that tells the story of the world’s recreation. The Anishinaabe, or the Original People, launch one day into arguing and fighting—brothers and sisters turning against each other. So the Creator decides to purify the Earth of this toxicity. A great flood destroys the Earth, along with the Anishinaabe people. Only Nanabozho is able to survive, with a few animals and birds. He tries to dive to the bottom of the ocean to collect a piece of the Earth in the hopes of recreating it, but he fails. The loon, then, known to be a talented diver, also descends, but greatly weakened by the attempt, returns to die shortly thereafter. A muskrat is finally able to retrieve a tiny piece of Earth and deposit it on a turtle’s back. So an island begins to grow.
Artist Andrea Carlson was inspired by this story for the creation of her new artwork, “Red Exit” (2020), now showing on another sort of island—the latest in a series of public art installations presented by the Whitney Museum and High Line Art on the facade of 95 Horatio Street in New York City. “It’s a wake that is made up of stepping 10 landscapes,” Carlson shares, “and at its center is a loon, one of the original Earth divers in our recreation story.” The vibrant, multi-layered work on paper has been reproduced as a 17-by-29-foot vinyl.
Carlson started working on the piece before the pandemic—an almost foreshadowing depiction of a planet in deeply rooted disarray. “It seemed like kind of the end of the world,” she recalls on creating the work, “but then the pandemic started, and I was like ‘We really need our Earth divers to recreate the world now.’” Despite the inferences, Carlson assures us her piece is meant to be joyful, to be seen as a celebration of survival.
When asked about her biggest accomplishments, Carlson proudly cites this project with the Whitney Museum, along with learning the Ojibwe language after six years of studying. As a proud member of the Ojibwe tribe, however, her biggest accomplishment goes hand in hand with her hardest challenges. “It’s the space where I am working with a museum that might have 7,000 bodies of my ancestors,” she reflects. “So, for me, challenges in my career often arise out of the institutional harm of museums.”
Carlson is not unaware of the continual erosion and dismantling of Indigenous languages. “I know that, often, when I speak Ojibwe, it’s the first time people have heard of this language, and that’s really unfortunate,” she remarks. However, she still strives with every artwork she creates to teach people a little about her ancestry, be it a word in Ojibwe front and center, or a loon inspired by the creation story of her tribe. “Learning the language, learning the logic of it, learning the structure of it. Then you start applying that to your environment… That’s also part of decolonization—decolonizing our minds.”
For Carlson, her roots are not an obstacle, but an open door. “I want to base my work in this very sincere, very personal place. I don’t want to step out of who I am. I want to celebrate that.” Carlson’s artistic journey is a commemoration of what was, what is, and what will be—retrieved from our deepest histories, reconsidered, and regrown on a turtle’s back… with help, of course, from a loon.