Currently On View

Ash Frantz (Makah) is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist and curator graduating this spring from the MFA Studio Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Working across video projection, installation, and photography, their practice explores the body as an extension of land, engaging Indigenous feminism, queer temporality, and cultural resurgence shaped by distance, longing, and reconnection.

Channel 1:

hi·dax̌, 2 minutes 56 seconds (looped footage)

Channel 2:

Water Quilt V3 (Cape Flattery), 3 minute 1 second (looped footage)

hi·dax̌
Single-channel video, 2025 

hi·dax̌ , meaning “ready to be,” draws from nontraditional methods of learning shaped by digital spaces and is inspired by Nadia Myre’s Acts That Fade Away. This video projection functions as an abstracted tutorial, reflecting my process of reclaiming knowledge of cedar work that has been obscured by settler colonialism and intergenerational trauma. Through woven and mirrored footage, the piece considers the barriers to learning customary practices like cedar basketry and how those traditions are reassembled from fragments and memory. 

Material practice here becomes both personal ritual and political act, speaking to the resilience of Indigenous knowledge systems. Layers of opacity and partial visibility echo how certain teachings are protected or misunderstood, yet slowly pieced back together in my ongoing process of reclamation.