Terran Last Gun: Future Cosmic Energy
April 17 2023 - August 12 2023
Terran Last Gun/Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Piikani/Blackfeet) centers his artmaking around the process of color exploration and visual documentation of nature, cosmos, cultural narratives, and recollections of home. Through geometric abstraction, he contributes to an ongoing Indigenous narrative through various media that include ledger drawing, Blackfoot painted lodges and the visual iconographic vocabulary that accompanies them, printmaking, painting, and photography. Last Gun’s work explores the varying relationships between color, shape, nature, and sky. He says, “Blackfoot painted lodges are visual masterpieces of the Great Plains. They depict the world and cosmos in which we live through our natural surroundings, symbolic animals and helpers, and the above world that connects us to the Sun, Moon, and Morning Star.” Son of notable painter Terrance Guardipee, Last Gun comes from a long visual tradition. “My work bridges the ancient to the contemporary. I am creating a new Piikani art form that is bold, vivid, even humorous at times and has minimalist and geometric qualities that are potent in meaning, content, and place.”
Related Press
Santa Fe Reporter - Branching Lines: Artist Terran Last Gun fine-tunes his content and trajectory - May 3, 2023
Missoulian - Terran Last Gun: Piikani artist's geometric Indigenous abstraction - May 4, 2023
Related Events
Friday, May 5 from 5 to 8 PM - First Friday celebration with Terran Last Gun
Saturday, May 6 from 10 AM to 1 PM - Terran Last Gun: Artist Talk
About the Artist
Terran Last Gun received his BFA in museum studies and AFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 2016. At IAIA he was a student of Neal Ambrose-Smith. He has received awards from the First Peoples Fund, 2020 Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship, and the Santa Fe Art Institute 2018 Story Maps Fellowship. In 2022, Last Gun was named one of the “Twelve New Mexico Artists to Know Now in the Southwest.” He is currently represented by the McClain Gallery, Houston, Texas, as well as Hecho en Mano in Santa Fe and Gallery Hózhó in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Image: courtesy Samantha Tracy.