Poetry = Anger X Imagination

"Poetry = Anger x Imagination"
— Sherman Alexie

Raymond Thunder-Sky's drawings are elemental yet sophisticated, and house within them meanings that are deceptively simple.  He is roaming the cityscape trying to find destruction so that the creative part of his imagination can fill in the emptiness.  He is trying to find a way to resurrect all that's been lost for him, and maybe even his ancestors.  Raymond was a Mohawk, his father the chief of that tribe.  The history of the way Native Americans were relegated violently to the background of main-stream history is sorrowful and horrible, but from the destruction and devastation comes a spirit that produces greatness.  Raymond had a psychic connection with that sense of loss and what can be gained from reinventing that loss.  In every one of his drawings he is appropriating what time, culture and capitalism does to the landscape:  buildings being bulldozed, wires and earth revealed like what's underneath flesh, a whole universe of destruction, peopleless and more beautiful because of that.  There's an aura of inescapable loneliness, with sky-writing (like smoke signals) letting you know the future.
 
 

Like Raymond, Bunky Echo-Hawk appropriates the dross of a sad culture and takes that waste and creates a new function from the form:  a sarcastic, head-on collision that redefines the way we define Native people.  He surveys the saccharine in order to present the sardonic, usually finding solace in laughing at both the hopeless stereotypes that usually represent Native Americans, as well as the sentimental attempts to cling at those stereotypes by constantly reinventing them.  For example:

The tropes of strange blue aliens/angels, a cartoon figurine from a faux-past, and/or a "sympathetic" white guy "going Native" are interchangeable and allow everyone to feel as if all that "bad stuff" that happened is now just an almost forgotten dream.  Look at everyone in the picture staring off into space, vacuous and posing as if they are on the cover of the new Vanity Fair. 

The dream gets revised in the art made by both Raymond and Bunky.  Their works find a way to critique and resist without shrillness or arrogance.  They merge anger with imagination, as Sherman Alexie says, and produce poetry.