It Dropped Down Their Minds

Events

Staats' lens-based work and more recently, performance, video installation and sculpture, combines language, mnemonics and the natural world as an ongoing process of reconnecting with a Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] restorative aesthetic that defines the multiplicity of relationships with trauma and renewal. The trauma that is felt from his personal and existential displacement from the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) language and subsequent relational worldview, has motivated a recent sequencing of video and photographic works within a mnemonic continuum. In creating recent large scale photo installation works, this visual restitution draws influences from within Staats' family archive, which consists of diaries, letters, photographs and audio recordings; the Haudenosaunee creation story; the ceremonial continuum of performative burdens of condolence, and a continuously re-imagined role as observer and participant, all in an effort to elevate the mind and to countervail complex trauma, dissociation and the existential loss of self.