The Road: Carmen Selam

“For me, the act of making is its own form of navigation,” writes multidisciplinary Santa Fe–based artist Carmen Selam (Yakama Nation and Comanche) in her artist statement. “Each print, each mark, becomes a map of where I have been and where I am going.” Selam’s practice of inhabiting the things she makes—of finding her way in them—allows them to become multidimensional, with numberless avenues linking personal experience to “histories embedded in the land… assert[ing] Indigenous presence within spaces that have long sought to pave over it.”

The freedom of movement—that classic symbolism of the road—is always relative. For Selam, the road is full of binaries—connection and erasure, movement and displacement. It also represents the possibility of return. In works like The Black Pearl (2023), she renders a long black car in intricate glass beadwork on buckskin fabric. Using materials and imagery that speak to “both tradition and contemporary Indigenous experience,” she writes, is a way to connect history and the current moment. There isn’t a road in sight, only the car, a traveler’s accomplice through the vast field of space and memory. Perhaps functioning like Selam’s art practice, it is the means by which we get back home.

In her linocut Unspoken Currents (2021), another car—a broad sedan—is oriented away from the viewer, spare white lines giving it a spectral form in the flat landscape where outsized flowers bloom. Inside the car, there is the outline of passengers— their backs to us, oriented toward a few bright stars. In Unspoken Currents, again, there is no road, only the suggestion that the entirety of its negative space might be one. The canvas—whether paper or buck- skin—is a place where a maze of “routes ancestral, personal, and imagined,” are the open space, a field of possibility where many ways converge and new ones appear.