Singing Double: A Neon Horizon from Artist Marie Watt

Artist Marie Watt illuminates the link between Marvin Gaye and her neon work 'Shared Horizon (Keepers of the Western Door)'

By Jennifer Wehunt // Art by Marie Watt
Conservation
Sep 26, 2024

WHAT IS A SUNRISE OR A SUNSET? Do we share it? How do its colors or temperatures change, according to where it’s viewed? Those were just a few of the questions the artist Marie Watt asked herself while envisioning her neon work “Shared Horizon (Keepers of the Western Door)” (above). “In the Haudenosaunee community, the Seneca are considered Keepers of the Western Door, just as the Mohawks are the Keepers of the Eastern Door,” Watt says. But what is “west” for Watt, a member of the East Coast’s Seneca Nation who grew up and lives in the Pacific Northwest? She found some answers, or at least inspiration, in Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” In the song, Gaye twins each relation he sings: mother, mother; brother, brother. “The doubled name creates an urgency, hurling the call longer and louder in space,” Watt says. “From an Indigenous perspective, it is a call that carries back to our ancestors and forward to future generations.” Watt sees that call extending to aunties, grandmothers, deer and sky. “We are all companion species,” she says, and we share the horizon’s sunrises and sunsets among us all: “plants, animals, humans, trees, Earth.” See more of Watt’s artwork.