Drawing on her multi-cultural identity, Avner’s work navigates her Native American heritage and her upbringing and adult life in urban centers of California. While referencing her ancestral lands and culture, her work explores her own experience of dislocated indigeneity and a pursuit of a space unbound by concepts of colonialism.

In Athabascan Aurora: Decolonizing Subarctic Light, Avner references the forested subarctic along the Yukon river. For generations, her ancestors would fish the summer king salmon run there, a tradition her family continues to uphold. The sculpture, an impression of a large fireweed flower accompanied by birch leaves and stems is intended to evoke the subarctic biome. In utilizing city materials to convey the natural elements, Avner seeks to capture the dichotomy of her lived environment.

Koyukon Athabascan beadwork imagery projects from the sculpture, becoming the light that moves through the entirety of the space. As a visual metaphor, these projections of beadwork embody continuity in relation to past and present technologies. Digital, traditional, and upcycled materials form hybrid objects representing an imagined and ancestral imaginary.

Janna Avner is an Alaska Native, Athabascan. She graduated from Yale University (2012) and received her MA from California State University, Northridge (2022). Her artworks and curations are reviewed in Vice, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Artforum, ARTNews, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, and the New York Times.

Avner’s works have been exhibited at the San Luis Obispo Museum, the Torrance Art Museum, UNICEF USA, Matsudo International Science + Art Festival (Japan), University of Alaska, and contemporary galleries worldwide. She was a guest speaker for UCLA’s Digital Media Arts Department (2017) and the New York Times School (2019); her writings on Artificial Intelligence were published in “What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate, and Reinvent Our Future” (2017), considered “one of the best science books of the year” by Smithsonian Magazine; she was the Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Art Fellow at the School for Advanced Research (2023); Janna cofounded the digital media festival FEMMEBIT and advises SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery.