The Story Is Yours, Too

Keim engages with the work of artist Joe Feddersen. Renowned for his use of ancient Plateau Indian aesthetic traditions of geometric abstraction to depict modern landscapes in the mediums of print, basketry, photography, collage, and glass, Feddersen's works have been displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and can be found in the collections of Microsoft and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Feddersen shies away from the didactic. It is up to the viewer to make the meaning, he says, and he seems pleased as he describes his favorite of his works: Floating By, a spray-painted collage that resembles a section of graffitied gas station wall. A dripping orange line bisects the print, obscuring a pickup truck, and above it floats a boat containing three petroglyphic figures: a frog (or is it a bear?), a human, and something unrecognizable--maybe an alien? There is a whimsicality to them, a jauntiness reminiscent of Japanese candy wrappers, and also a poignancy, and he imagines them as three friends in a modern-day Noah's ark, afloat in a flood of fast-food chains and the sprawl of late capitalism, carrying the seeds of something better.