To Be Made Whole In The City is a photographic installation of urban landscapes made by Chormicle between 2017-2020, when he lived in the PHX area; and portraits of young Native people, that Chormicle met through art, who are living in the Phoenix area. The landscapes were made during Chormicle’s first time living in a heavily urban area. The city carried a weight that at times seemed to flatten the very spirit of the individual, and produce a homogenized being. When Chormicle decided to re-approach the work in 2024, he felt differently about the city. There is space to carve out individuality and resist the flattening of self. The portraits assert the individuals as whole beings, 3 Dimensional people, who exist in relation to each other, the land and the spirit, resisting the weight of the city. The inherent hope found in people living their lives, and choosing to continue to make art, and be in community with one another shows that no city, idea or agenda is capable of truly flattening us.

Man Down (directed by Marcus Xavier Chormicle and Ryan M. Robson) is an ode to my grandfathers, Donald Chormicle and Hoyt Inman. Grandpa Hoyt, my maternal grandfather, when he returned to the US after being drafted into Vietnam, performed in gunfighter shows across Southern New Mexico. He’s seen in the photos likely playing the slain sheriff or deputy in the Lincoln Pageant, which still happens annually in the town of Lincoln, NM. After returning from war he took part in these performances while he recovering from the emotional and mental stress of war. When he passed in 2023, I received an archive of photos these performances. Although he never spoke about this time in the context of art, I view his reenactments of historical violence as form of theater and catharsis.

My paternal grandfather, Donny, an enrolled Agua Caliente man, was shot while in police custody in the early 70s in Las Cruces. He died from an overdose at the age of 27, taking drugs to cope with the pain of the wound.

The video piece asserts my body into the historical canon of the New Mexico territory. I seek to highlight the ways that different people in New Mexico engage with gun violence and question the systems that perpetuate further violence in the area, including the way we uphold it through art and culture.

As my body contorts to take the forms that my grandfathers’ bodies may have taken, I close one loop of a cycle of violence that still impacts people from the region today.