Marie Watt (Seneca Nation, b. 1967)

In its Summer 2022 news release, Mullowney Printing provided details about the significance of Nancy Bowen as the subject of the print:

Nancy Bowen was a Cayuga and Hodinöhsö:ni’ woman from the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation. In 1930 she was tried for the murder of Clothilde Marchand in Buffalo, New York. Prior to her trial, however, the media and judicial system demonized Bowen and proclaimed her guilty for the crime of being Indigenous, rendering her guilty in the court of public opinion and denying her the opportunity for a fair and just trial. This project aims to reclaim Nancy Bowen’s story and place it in the context of what is happening today. Her story connects to our present moment, to the story of George Floyd, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) and others who have directly experienced death, incarceration, and systemic trauma as a result of entrenched racism. In Nancy Bowen (Reconciliation), Watt worked directly on two soft ground plates repeatedly writing Nancy Bowen’s name with her left and right hand simultaneously. There is no accessible record of Nancy Bowen’s signature, which led Watt to use this process to imagine and reflect on Bowen’s bodily presence or in the words of Jason Vartikar “invoke history and futurity in one stroke.” The resulting image is an amalgamation of many layers of writing which appear, when printed in the intaglio process, backwards. Watt chose to have the plates printed on two thin translucent sheets of gampi, then adhered frontside down on the backing sheet so that the text was again right reading. Twinning language is a concept that Watt uses throughout her work, in this case a calling back and calling forward to recognize the permutations of historic racism in ongoing conversations and hopes for reconciliation.

            file:///C:/Users/weeklyns/Downloads/MarieWatt_NewReleases_FINAL8-8-22.pdf