Made from fish bones collected at the Salton Sea over years, these moths carry a story of ancestry and self discovery in a metaphor of the balance that sky and ocean offer the land/body— the land being our ancestors as well as an ongoing relationship. Comprised of the operculum bone which is the bony flap that covers the gill, this work reverses a sensibility of breath that take something aquatic into something airborne. Calling attention toward embodied lessons of how it must feel to "breath underwater", this work highlights the amount of loss and grief that haunts us and our ancestries every day. In a world that is upside down, a distorted reflection of the original cultures of the "pre-colombian" positions of the "americas", stolen, extracted from, and remade to enact ongoing State harms and irreparable traumas to indigenous communities, my Medicine Moths are a prayer to liberating the human spirit and the coming together of all diverse cultures of the earth to take flight and repair the world.

I am named after my grandmother's maiden name, Miller and she told me in the old days they called moths, millers. Akin to other acts of flight, the moth are ancestors of past sent to offer the silent signals and embedded messages we need to resist the current waves of settler colonial violences (informed and paralleling to early histories in Amerikkka but moving at exponential computation speeds).

Adhered to the wall with museum wax or epoxy putty, my medicine moths symbolize the medicine of knowing one's ancestors, skeletons and all, while finding your role toward liberation in that positionality as we must all gather and fly together.

Look to the sky, look to the sea and find a solid form in that in-between.

Miller Robinson

Miller Robinson