Jamison Chās Banks
(Seneca-Cayuga and Cherokee of Oklahoma)
At his core, Jamison Chās Banks is a storyteller. He invents narratives on a grand scale, including stories about a troop of Native American air force fighter pilots in the Pacific theatre during World War II, Napoleon Bonaparte colonizing the southeastern United States, a former Confederate soldier in the gold rush, and UN soldiers defending an unknown border in the Middle East. In series such as Big Bad Wolf, Retour des Cendres Vol. I (Return of the Ashes), Cibola, and Terrortories: The Frontier, Banks tells stories about different characters within a larger context, weaving together the personal and the historical by using a variety of media, including video, photography, printmaking, installation, and performance.
Banks considers the growth of the body in the context of the camera. “The eye was the first light sensor.” Banks notes that developing eyes encouraged animals to move toward the light, forming a powerful “metaphor, moving toward the light.”
It’s that simple. When [we] look at things, that’s what we’re doing - we’re moving towards the light, moving toward enlightenment. None of us know why we’re here or why we even have eyes to perceive the world we live in. We are compelled to see and to understand. We have eyes, ears, and all the senses, yet there are things in the world, in the universe, that our senses can’t usually perceive. But every now and then, we do. Art is a portal to that information.
-Suzanne Newman Fricke
Author, As We See It: Conversations with Native American Photographers