INKPA MANI

My practice asks how Indigenous knowledge systems, material traditions, and emerging digital
forms can be held together and interlock. Through this convergence, I seek to create spaces
that honor continuity while challenging narratives of disappearance, silence, or fragmentation.
My work engages both historical and virtual space to examine how reality is shaped through
ancestry, memory, and perception. Through painting and sculpture I explore how the physical
and the immaterial coexist as intertwined forms of physical, spiritual and virtual presence.
Stones, pigments, textiles, and digital interfaces become collaborators that carry knowledge,
memory, and contradiction. I also employ the use of the sticker, rendered image, and gestural
mark-making to create propositions in my work, allowing multiple visual languages to challenge
the stability of representation. By working across these spaces, I acknowledge the histories that
have shaped me while resisting the forms of erasure imposed on Mestizo and North American
Indigenous people and their cultural lineages.
Drawing from Indigenous abstraction, Northern Plains and Northern Mexican cosmologies, the
material intelligence held in survival-based practices, and Western representational image
making. I treat each material and image as holding ancestral and speculative potential. Soil,
stone, and fabric contain memory of their use, while digital fields of light echo spiritual forms of
apparition and transmission. These processes align with Gerald Vizenor’s philosophy of
Survivance and Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of Nepantla, each of which describe states of
presence that exist in tension, transition, and transformation.
I am particularly interested in how virtual and ancestral spaces mirror one another. Both operate
as forms of reality that are not always visible yet remain deeply felt. A carved stone can function
like a screen, and a digital image can hold the weight of ceremony. Each work therefore can
become a site where competing understandings of the real converge.