Terran Last Gun
...in the Side Room
Last Gun considers relationships between color, form, land, and the cosmos, influenced by his own experiences and cultural heritage as a member of the Piikani Nation. His geometric abstractions combine visual references to ancient Indigenous North American culture with a contemporary artistic approach informed by his background in printmaking, painting, and photography. Simultaneously engaging with history, the present, and optimism for the future, his works constantly shift across timelines.
Ledger drawings emerged in the late 19th century, primarily created by Plains Indians to document aspects of daily life such as hunting and battle scenes. Artists depicted representational subjects on repurposed paper sourced from accounting ledger books, partly due to its accessibility. Last Gun’s abstract compositions, however, depart from traditional narrative ledger drawings, deriving formal inspiration from the aesthetics of Blackfoot painted lodges, hides, war shirts, and archaeological artifacts throughout Montana and Alberta.
The exhibition features two recurring compositions: individual works with square forms symbolizing doorways and diptychs with rectangular forms representing windows. Both doors and windows serve as gateways to new ways of thinking, offering a transportive quality that invites exploration. Last Gun’s individual works expand his ongoing interest in the square form and its symmetry. In these compositions, he fills the squares completely with color, allowing the ledger paper to remain visible through the colored pencil. These doorways reference Blackfoot painted lodges, specifically doorways painted on the back of the lodges, which were often considered spirit doors and positioned to face the sunset. Last Gun’s diptychs, with their extended horizontal orientation, evoke the feeling of landscapes. By combining two separate sheets of paper, he explores the duality and energy created through their connection.
Last Gun distinguishes each work through his use of color, exploring both monochromatic and complementary palettes. His practice remains firmly rooted in color theory and color relativity, with a continuous interest in understanding why people are drawn to specific colors. The color wheel plays a central role in the artist’s process, guiding him to select color schemes that create harmony and engage the viewer. In his work Important Ideas Come Into Existence (2025), he focuses solely on various shades of white, investigating the subtlety and depth that can be achieved within a single color.
A notable feature of Last Gun’s exhibition is the use of ledger paper dated 1923 and 1924, gifted to the artist by his father and an anonymous donor from Tucson. The dates remain legible within the artist’s work and reference the historical context of those eras of hardship for all Indigenous communities. By using historical paper, he breathes new life into it, reintroducing and emphasizing the history of his people in the broader, mainstream narrative of North America.
Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989, Browning, Montana) is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation (Blackfeet) of Montana and a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Piikani are one of four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, collectively called the Niitsitapi (Real People). Last Gun received his BFA in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016.
Last Gun has had solo exhibitions at University of Northern Colorado, Greeley; Hockaday Museum of Art, Kalispell, MT; University of Montana Western, Dillon; K Art, Buffalo, NY; Missoula Art Museum, MT; and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; among others. His work will be included in the upcoming 12th International SITE SANTA FE and has been exhibited at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; The 8th Floor, New York, NY; Museum of the Plains Indian, Browning, MT; and Contemporary at Blue Star, San Antonio, TX; among others. His work is included in the collections of several museums across the United States. In 2024, Last Gun was awarded the Biennial Grant by the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.