Terran Last Gun

Unlike early ledger drawing, Last Gun’s work is geometric rather than representational. Much of his “visual vocabulary” is drawn from traditional imagery used on Blackfoot painted lodges, which he thinks of in three tiers. The bottom represents the land. His own nation, the Piikani, live near the mountains, which are represented on their lodges by triangles. The middle of the lodge is specific to a person, often depicting an animal. The top represents the sky.

“I work with the land and the sky,” Last Gun says. “A lot of our stories connect to the sky. Our creator is the sun, his wife is the moon and their child is Morning Star, who’s represented by Venus. One of my elders said that the cosmos provides energy and medicine to our bodies, to who we are, and it made me think of color and shape and how those radiate this certain energy as well.”

That idea is reflected in Last Gun’s use of color. “A lot of my work is color exploration,” he says. “How can I create color harmony and color relationships?”

He works largely with complementary and split-complementary color schemes which “really activate each other and start to vibrate,” he says. “Subtle colors have a lot to say too—my color palette has gone that way as well, more of these tints of color, a pure color.”

In addition to drawing on his own nation’s aesthetics, Last Gun sees parallels with Western art movements like op art, pop art and minimalism in his work, many of which were first influenced by Indigenous art.