SANTA FE — The greatest art is impossible to write about, because it surpasses human understanding. Dakota Mace’s solo exhibition “Dahodiyinii – Sacred Places” at SITE Santa Fe represents the unrepresentable.
Mace’s exhibition revisits the history of the Long Walk, during which the United States Army, in the 1860s, forcibly marched approximately 10,000 Diné (Navajo) to a prison camp at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. Adolf Hitler later studied the Bosque Redondo camp and used it as a model for his own concentration camps, according to the Jewish Journal.
With large scale installations that combine photosensitive chemicals and natural pigments, Mace takes her images to the edge of annihilation, symbolizing the violent displacement of her Diné ancestors and the desecration of their homeland.
