New Red Order: Crimes Against Reality
Video exhibition by New Red Order. Curated by Jenna Maurice & Adán De La Garza.
On display July 1-August 27, 2023
Part of Denver’s Month of Video and our Roots Radical Exhibition Program.
About the Exhibition
New Red Order: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples, lands, and ways of life. NRO provocatively questions how these desires can be channeled into something productive, sustainable, and transformative.
About New Red Order
New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit). In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labor to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource.
New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that 'plays Indian'—calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency.
Featured Videos
Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality
2020, 9 mins, 2-channel HD video, sound
Crimes Against Reality focuses on two public sculptures by James Earle Fraser — End of the Trail (1894), a statue originally intended to be installed on the California coast at the scale of the Statue of Liberty, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in 2022 — both of which commemorate the origin myth of America.
Never Settle: The Program
2018 - Ongoing, 50 mins, HD video, sound
Never Settle: The Program is a promotional initiation video which simultaneously satirizes and sincerely engages with solidarity and the desire for Indigenous epistemologies, luring inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation.
Give It Back: Stage Theory
About Denver Month of Video
Denver Month of Video (.MOV) is a month-long exhibition event and curatorial platform showcasing a wide variety of video-based arts across multiple venues in the city of Denver.
.MOV seeks to feature the work of current video-based art practitioners to support the video art community while offering multiple access points for the video curious in the city of Denver. .MOV is committed to paying artists and curators for their participation in the festival!
About the Roots Radical Exhibition Program
Roots Radical supports Native-led organizations and artists, and the deeper exploration of our communities’ collective ancestry and Indigenous histories.