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Brilliant ambiguities spring from artist's childhood
Thursday, December 6, 2001
By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC
John Feodorov spent his childhood selling the sacred door to door. Even though he hasn't been a Jehovah's Witness since then, it's a past that comes in handy. At 40, he's still selling the sacred, this time as art.
He got what should have been a career boost when he became the only artist whose current exhibit in Seattle was previewed on national television.
Native American artist John Feodorov has been a major exhibitor at the Sacred Circle Gallery of American Indian Art in Discovery Park. PAUL KITAGAKI JR./P-IBut
"Art: 21," a PBS series subtitled "Art in the 21st Century," featured him in a segment that had the misfortune to run right after Sept. 11, when almost nobody was paying attention. Of the 21 artists profiled, he's the only one who isn't already an art-world name brand. Attention on that scale feels like a breakthrough, until, unpredictably, it happens in a vacuum.
About this reversal he remains sanguine. "I was lucky to be included in the first place," he says. Being in something that turns out to be nothing is a contradiction he appreciates. He makes art from contradictions.
From the warring absolutes of his childhood come his brilliant ambiguities, a sample of which is on view at the Sacred Circle Gallery of American Indian Art in Daybreak Star Arts Center in Discovery Park through Dec. 24.
Raised in a suburb of Los Angeles,
Feodorov remembers going with his mother to the Navajo Club to soak up some Indian camaraderie before she converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses and lost touch.
Summers he spent with his Navajo grandparents on the reservation in New Mexico. His grandfather was a yeibichai (healing ceremony dancer) and his grandmother a hand trembler (oracle). At home, his mother worked two jobs, leaving his older sister to look after him. His father, a Russian, wasn't around.
Feodorov has a half-brother who grew up on the reservation and is active in tribal politics. Another was put up for adoption and returned as an adult, having been raised as a Jew. A third is what Feodorov calls "a man of constant sorrow," in and out of trouble, while the sister who helped raise him is a staunch Jehovah's Witness.
At school, surrounded by whites and convinced it was "somehow shameful to be an Indian," he scored low on intelligence tests but high on playground savvy. "My friends were usually the kids in the gifted programs, and I could tell on some level I belonged there." In second grade he started playing the violin. He drew constantly, studied the Bible and bided his time.
A friend, Paul Stewart, was also a musician and had a father who was a minister in the Disciples of Christ. "Compared to J.W., Disciples of Christ were laid-back," Feodorov said.
In college at the University of California at Long Beach, Feodorov and Stewart studied medieval music and listened to rock 'n' roll. Feodorov found his way to the art department, where artist and teacher Beverly Naidus had a big influence on his thinking.
"She said, 'John, you're a good painter. So what?' I realized that painting is a tool, and that I can use others, including music, to be an artist."
Influences from that time include German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, because in his "operas he could say the most pointed things in sensuous and beautiful language," and German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann, because of what "he could do on the formal level, the scale shifts and condensed experiences." [Note: Brecht's name was incorrect in the original version of this article.]
Eventually, life in Whittier became too restrictive. "The people I knew were so intellectual they looked down on anyone who actually tried to do something."
He and Stewart moved to Santa Fe, where Feodorov studied Navajo music at the Wheelwright Museum. He had his first great sculpture idea in Santa Fe, where he developed his long-running series of "Totem Teddies," designed to meet the spiritual needs of consumers of all ages.
Sitting or squatting on a wall shelf with heads covered in hooded masks made of animal skins embossed with woodblock-print faces, the teddies each come with a pamphlet, advising consumers on the necessity of keeping their Totem Teddy happy. Is there a better satire on the New Age predilection for picking up poorly grasped bits of wisdom from indigenous cultures and revamping them into sappy self-help?
After returning to Cal State to get his degree in art, he married Nicole Schildknegt, with whom he has a child, Hannah Sophia, age 4.
In 1992, they were both tired of Los Angeles. "Nicole wanted to live around water and I wanted mountains. Seattle was the logical choice."
In 1995, his breakthrough installation, "Forest at Night," debuted at the Sacred Circle Gallery. The trees were made of plastic sewer pipe covered in contact paper with a simulated wood-grain. Instead of branches, there are long doll arms, painted red. In their tiny, outstretched hands are a variety of plastic objects: toy owls, snakes, deer, squirrels and pine needles.
At the base of each tree is a photo of a clear-cut stump from the Cascades and a dish of sawdust. The bird calls and insect buzzes are electronically simulated, and each tree is wire with fluorescent blue tubes for moonlight.
Using kitsch materials, he achieved a heartbreaking profundity wrapped in demented humor, which isn't his idea of stretch. In his work, opposites attract. "People like me are said to live between two worlds, which isn't true. We live in a third world, a blend of both. As an artist, I'm trying to express that blend."
To make ends meet, Feodorov has for years worked in an office doing data processing and answering phones. Understanding corporate culture from the ground up inspired his latest installation, now on view at Sacred Circle, titled "The Office Shaman."
"Sales lagging?" asks Feodorov's pitch man on a CD-ROM, running at the gallery and online through
[email protected]. "Then you need an office shaman!"
The exhibit features a cubicle with a creaky old typing chair resting on dirt and surrounded by plastic spirit circles. Another has a plush, high-backed chair painted to dominate the cityscape behind it. Facing it are a dozen teddy bears kneeling on Astroturf, nature submitting to the breakthrough dominant animal. Masks and small figures are fetishistic keepsakes festooned with key elements of Native American stereotyped spirituality -- feathers, animal hides, bead and bells -- to remind participants of their shaman retreat.
Feodorov is also a musician. From 1993 to 1997, he was songwriter and guitarist for the now defunct band, Skinwalkers, and has recently released a CD with Stewart titled "Fish Magic" on his own label, Ambiguous Music. In their spare time, he and Stewart are working on an opera to be titled, "Three Heroic Acts."