For the second iteration of the exhibition series Landscape & Life we proudly present the work of Diné artist, composer and educator Raven Chacon. Indexical will be exhibiting two works by Chacon, including his early photo and sound series Field Recordings (1999) which depict three sites from the Southwestern U.S. noted for their quietude: Canyon de Chelly, Window Rock and the Sandia Mountains. Chacon's phonography amplifies these quiet spaces to maximum volume, reducing them to noise while simultaneously revealing colors and patterns that might otherwise go undetected. Also on view will be a reproduction of American Ledger No. 1 (2018), a graphic score meant to be performed by “many players with sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match.”

Raven Chacon (born 1977) is a Diné artist known as a composer of chamber music, as well as a solo performer of noise music. He was born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States. Chacon attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he received an MFA in music composition and was a student of James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith. Chacon also performs in the groups KILT with Bob Bellerue, Mesa Ritual with William Fowler Collins, Endlings with John Dieterich, and collaborations with Laura Ortman. In 2016, he was commissioned by Kronos Quartet to compose a work for their Fifty For The Future project. Chacon serves as Composer-in-Residence with the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project. He has received awards and honors including a Creative Capital Visual Arts Grant (2012), a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship in Music (2014), and the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin (2018).

Header photograph of American Ledger No. 1 by Joel Tsui.

Landscape & Life is a year-long exhibition series that coincides with the opening of Indexical's new brick-and-mortar venue located at the Tannery Arts Center in Santa Cruz, California. The series explores the work of artists who draw our attention to the imminence of life within the landscape, making visible and audible the presence of human and non-human vitality in what in art, geography and law has too often been represented as empty space.