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Supported by the Confluencecenter and the W.A. Franke Honors College, Bridging Borders: Honoring Interdisciplinary Student Talent, proposes a series of three semester workshops and events developed and led by selected Arts and Humanities students. This is the second event in the series.
Weston Lane is a Franke Honors student studying photography at the University of Arizona School of Art. He was born in Page, Arizona, and lives in Tucson. He received his associate degree in visual arts from Pima Community College, and was featured in the student Annual Juried Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery show in 2022. Through his latest bodies of work, Lane utilizes photography and found objects to explore ethical issues about his own Navajo community. His work speaks conceptually about America’s history of colonization by combining different medias and disciplines of art.
His exhibition, Past and Present, discusses the colonization of Native Americans by showing the effects of assimilation on his grandmother, as well as the history of oppression of the Navajo people. His first installation is about the forced assimilation of his grandmother into the American educational system by the United States government, showing archival images of her. The images are enhanced with the interactivity of Augmented reality that recreates parts of his grandmother’s story and the experience she had of being forced into school. The augmented reality in his work is not only used as a technological device to interact with the images of the past, but used to create a connection between the past and the present.
Lane's work also encompasses the history of the Navajo Long walk and the events that followed that led to the creation of frybread, a food that is culturally significant to the Navajo people and is eaten at special events and gatherings. The physical bread is combined with the past archival photographs of the event, tying both past and present together. This work addresses the resilience of the Navajo people by adapting and resisting oppression from the United States Army during the Long walk.
After the reception, Lane's work will be on display for a limited time in the Honors Village Office lobby.
