SPIRIT HOUSE

November 8 – January 31, 2026

Multidisciplinary artist Chaz John (Mississippi Band Choctaw, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and European) presents a gathered collection of Mississippian iconography, dream narratives, and personal archetypes. 

His work explores the visual language of the numinous, with forms shaped by ancestral connections to the Choctaw and French alliance at the mouth of the Mississippi, where dreaming in New Orleans becomes a cultural memory and a bridge across histories, bodies, and spiritual thresholds.

Through painting and aluminum casting, extensions of French painting and Mississippian metallurgy, John fuses two legacies of image-making and material transformation.

Operating like a trickster living in the joints, he embraces tension and connection between opposites. Drawing from Mississippian effigies that embody ancestral and spiritual power, he reimagines their presence through cast pumpkins and seashells with floral eyes and vegetal noses.

He reflects on the cycles of creation and decline that shape societies, prompting viewers to consider what traces of people, culture, and place remain over time.

Each work becomes a host body and inhabitable narrative, inviting viewers to cross between memory, myth, and the living worlds that continue through us.

Image 1 credit: Chaz John, Luna Moth, 2025. Lost wax aluminum, 11’x 14″. Photo credit Daniel Ulibarri.
Image 2 credit: Chaz John, Two Spirits with an Effigy, 2025. Oil paint on wood panel, 13″ x 16 1/2″. Photo credit Daniel Ulibarri.
Image 3 credit: Chaz John, Spirit of a Woman with Cherries, 2025. Oil paint on wood panel, 20 1/2″ x 20 1/2″. Photo credit Daniel Ulibarri.
Image 4 credit: Chaz John, Mississippian Hand with Effigy, 2025. Lost wax aluminum, old growth pine. 9″ x 3 1/2″ x 23 1/2″. Photo credit Daniel Ulibarri.