I saw this show mid-install and the gallerist’s talk of identity politics hardly served the work’s best interests. But even under ideal conditions, the photo tableaux documenting this Goldsmiths-trained artist’s journey to his Native American roots would have likely annoyed me. The aura of these works doesn’t bridge continents. If they serve the artist’s project of “reindigenization”, it’s only as a grift.
But Eash’s sculptures – assemblages of bull horn, shotgun cartridges, and wicker – jarred somewhat less. His painterly abstraction on cowhide – halfway between a tie-dye and a Rorschach ink blot – finally broke from his ideological bounds, as only an animal might. But for this world to be worth rebuilding, the artist must choose which ground is best ceded.