Selena Kearney

Selena Kearney is a Coast Salish artist working across performance and photography. Raised on the Chehalis Reservation, she grounds her practice in cultural continuity and the transmission of song, centering the ways sound and image are carried within systems of relation, and how Indigenous presence moves between what is shown and what is held back. In the collaborative performance Speak to the House, Speak to the Object, developed with Camille Casemier, voice, projected images, and spoken text engage Coast Salish objects stored in museum collections. Here, song carries memory and responsibility while examining how Indigenous material ancestors sit dormant in institutional spaces.

Song enters her work through her grounding in Coast Salish practices. She is a member of the elder-led canoe family, Spirit of the Raven, from the Suquamish Tribe, and has maintained this relationship since 2014. Selena was honored to serve as the skipper prior to relocating to Chicago. Within canoe journey, songs are learned and carried as part of a collective tradition. They guide movement and mark time, given in relation to others. Song, as a living system of coordination and offering, informs how she understands performance. As a collective technology of timing and relation, voice travels across multiple bodies, with ritual and attention moving through space.

Alongside performance, Selena works with photography and archival materials. In the series Object/Ritual she considers how Indigenous representation is manufactured and staged. The monograph Every Object Has a Ritual (Minor Matters, 2023) accompanied a solo exhibition at the Suquamish Museum. Selena holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.