Marcus Xavier Chormicle made progress on his ongoing photography project, “Say Uncle,” this summer, thanks to support from the College of Fine Arts’ Medici Circle.
Chormicle, a second-year MFA student in the School of Art, made photographs of his uncle in the pine forests on Mount San Jacinto, the mountain where his ancestors would escape the hot months in California. For the project, Chormicle has photographed his uncle, Michael Dean Chormicle, on his family’s ancestral lands at the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, Séc-He, in Palm Springs, California since 2021.
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“Say Uncle” is about an ancestral relationship to the Land which is upheld by walking along those paths,” said Chormicle. “It’s an unbroken relationship between myself and my relatives. Photography is always about time and light; the photographs are meant to invoke a way of seeing that my family has maintained.”
The canyon locations used by Chormicle are the same sites used by Edward Curtis for his compilation, “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume photo-ethnographic record of Indigenous peoples of North America.
“One thing that I think is important to contrast between these photographs and those of Curtis is this generational outlook, within a singular perspective. Curtis’ work sought to document and categorize through an ethnographic process. Despite the creative liberty he took in staging and dressing his subjects his work was still credited with descriptive power.”
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“Photography is always a singular perspective, a selection of a fraction of a second, and a view of a tiny portion of the vastness of the world … the way that I’m just a brief moment and perspective of my lineage, stretching backwards and forwards in time.”
And this summer he took crucial steps in completing his project.
Medici Circle Appreciation
“I would like to thank Ellen Sondag for the generous support that allowed me to spend time with my family in our ancestral homeland and to produce work that will serve as a memory of the bond between our family and our place in this world.”
- Southwest Contemporary | Alien: Marcus Xavier Chormicle