• -The Silent Epidemic -

Indigenous women and girls live in a climate of fear and chaos in the midst of daily violence and murder directed towards females on the reservation. This is brought on by a lack policing and public services on the reservations, black market human trafficking and outdated federal legislature preventing tribes from prosecuting non native citizens. This was a challenging piece to research after hearing variations of the same story shared over and over again with no justice. This issue has recently begun to gain attention State wide with the opening of a new Office in the Gila River exclusively for handling murders.

To communicate the contents of my historical reference, I used bold imagery illustrating the horrors of life for native women in this situation. The sky is a photo by famed photographer Andres Serrano made of blood and semen shot in the 90's, his work is provocative and confrontational; in this collage the image anchors the artwork and references the sexual violence and murder many native women experience. The foreground is composed of archival and found portraits online of Hopi and Dine women in front of yellow body bags at an active crime scene standing in for the thousands of Native women yet to be found. Lastly the center of the photo has a a grown woman and the young girl from the Navajo nation, the two most at risk female demographics. They are framed against the backdrop of Monument Valley, a symbol of Native Country. This issue has many layer's and a complex history, I tried to capture that in this composite.