Diné nishłį́. To’ahani’ nishłį́, Dibe’łizhini bashishchiin, Kinyaa’áanii dashicheii doo Honágháahnii dashinalí. Patrick Dean Hubbell is Dine’. He is originally from Navajo, NM located on the Navajo Nation in the southwest region of the United States. He earned his BFA from Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. He is a MFA candidate in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
I am Diné (Navajo). My work is an exploration of my Dine’ and Indigenous identity and journey within the contemporary moment. The foundation of my practice is inspired by cultural methodologies, references to traditional Indigenous art and philosophy and the abstractness of language, nature, time, and place. Incorporating a variety of mediums, including natural earth pigment collected from my Dine’ homelands, and two-dimensional painting and drawing mediums, my work aims to challenge the imposition of categorizations and to amplify aspects of Indigenous identity within the western ideologies of contemporary art. The physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of my life are translated through a combination of intuitive, gestural mark making, automatic drawing, and design. Using both elements of traditional substrate and incorporating sculptural elements of display, the two dimensional surface format recontextualizes figurative entities of abstraction. By expanding the principles and aesthetics of the western canon, my work seeks to redefine the visibility of the Indigneous experience.