New Myth is a good title for Luger’s exciting début at the Garth Greenan gallery—the show vividly outlines the iconography of an Indigenous science fiction. Three wall-spanning video projections, from the artist’s ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies project, document sweeping landscapes inhabited by “monster slayers,” performers whose bright, beautifully crafted costumes—zigzagging crocheted leggings, elaborate helmet-headdresses—are also seen on mannequins in the gallery, alongside gaily lurid, politically pointed ceramic sculptures embellished with fringe. The artist, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, presents these objects as battlefield artifacts of a symbolic war. A fearsome yellow-tongued, many-eyed purple creature is titled Greed; in Severed I and Severed II, the heads of decapitated serpents bare fangs that recall gas-pump nozzles. Over all, the exhibition hints at a hard-won victory against rapacious, ecocidal forces, among other stories. Luger’s compelling futurism fantastically distills, but doesn’t simplify or resolve, the conflicts of a cataclysmic present.
— Johanna Fateman
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