Desert Stories: The Art of Kelly Frye & Jazmin Novak

Showing in the Artists Circle Gallery, Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
July 15-Oct 27, 2024

“Desert Stories: The Art of Kelly Frye & Jazmin Novak” is an artist-led exhibition collaboratively curated by Kelly Frye (Tesuque Pueblo/Mescalero Apache descent) and Jazmin Novak (Diné) of the Santa Fe, New Mexico area. Desert Stories interweaves visual narratives of the Southwest in paintings, glass, clay, and bronze artworks. In Frye’s paintings, she reorganizes geometric patterns into symphonies of color that melt into each other. In Novak’s sculpture, she uses asymmetry in her color palettes to give emphasis to certain parts of desert animals, like rabbits and coyotes. Bringing together two- and three-dimensional expressions creates an innovative take on the world of the Southwest desert as seen in the artists’ reimaginings of angular pottery designs and iconic, brush-dwelling animals. Using color as a method of disorientation, Frye and Novak make us see familiar Southwest elements in a completely different and unfamiliar light.

Frye and Novak approach the Southwest ecosystem through an art of puzzling and repositioning familiar contexts that transforms these elements into new sites of meaning. Through their practices, they reveal that there is much more to consider about the visual landscape of the Southwest than what one might see at-a-glance. They give focus to how the past continues to influence the present and future of the desert landscape.