Terran Last Gun’s Eternal Ledger Drawings
Installation view of Terran Last Gun: Visual Reaffirmation at Chapter NY. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton.
A Powerful Place, Is A Diverse Place; The Above World Brings About New Thoughts; Important Ideas Come Into Existence; Connections To Be Made On Each Trail—thus read the declarative titles of Terran Last Gun’s immaculate drawings in his current show, Visual Reaffirmation at Chapter NY. Their names speak to a journey both physical and psychological: movement across oceans, through history, and along the modest page. Carefully stacked with gem-like shapes to form something like stained glass windows, flags, sunrises, or road signs, each work marks an epiphany or an arrival. The paper used is pre-printed with pink-blue grids, strewn with anonymous handwriting: antique ledger sheets, in many cases dating over 100 years old.
Terran Last Gun, Sometimes The Unknown Provides Strength, 2025, Ink and colored pencil on antique “Clerk of District Court, Fee Book, Blain County, Chinook, Montana” diptych ledger sheets (dated 1934); Watermark: Defiance Linen Ledger 1924, 15 1/2 x 40 ¾ in. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton.
Ledger art developed after such objects were traded among the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies towards the end of the 19th Century, replacing traditional drawing surfaces such as animal hide. Native speakers of Siksikáí’powahsin, the Blackfoot language, did not develop or employ a written alphabet until the 1960s, and thus the illustrations upon ledger sheets originally served not only as aesthetic devices, but as mnemonic ones.[1] Battles, hunts, peacemaking, and relationships were among the events originally documented on such pages. Last Gun too stores cultural memory in his drawings; the exhibition text confides that the colorful portals 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.”
Terran Last Gun, Positive Energy Remains During Dark Times, 2025, Ink and colored pencil on antique “The Tisch-Hine Co., Grand Rapids, Mich.” accounting ledger sheet (dated 1923); Watermark: Waverly Ledger 1922, 16 5/8 x 13 3/4 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton.
References aside, Last Gun’s work turns away from narrative, focusing on adapted symbols and rhythmic geometry. In presenting the comparably recent ledger sheet in tandem with ancient, glyph-like shapes, Last Gun contrasts structured, fixed forms intended for fact-keeping with eternal icons that echo across time. At least, this is the duality that appears at first look. In pondering these elements further, I return to the early history of record-keeping, thinking of how the ancient Sumerians invented writing to keep track of economic exchange and commerce.[2] Even the sensible and modern ledger sheet is atavistic at its core.
Terran Last Gun, Always Be Aware Of Your Surroundings, 2025, Ink and colored pencil on antique “The Tisch Hine Co., Grand Rapids, Mich.” accounting ledger sheet (dated 1923); Watermark: Waverly Ledger 1922, 16 5/8 x 13 3/4 in. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton.
In a more intuitive interpretation of Last Gun’s abstractions, the pale ledgers and neon hues seem to suggest varying psychic states and intentions, entry points to dialogues around reuse, heritage, and meditation. There are many ways to approach these drawings—as icons, records, structures, sensations. After visiting Visual Reaffirmation, I shared images of Last Gun’s drawings with a curator acquaintance. “Just gorgeous,” he cooed, swiftly noting similarities with Joseph Albers and Agnes Martin. Indeed, like Last Gun, Martin lived in New Mexico for many years, and it’s true that Albers was deeply inspired by pre-Columbian aesthetics and geometry. Yet it’s essential to note that Last Gun is not a guest of indigenous teachings, but an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation (Blackfeet) of Montana. His medium and methodologies are directly inherited from his ancestry; he actively works in this continuum.
Last Gun’s work sits not only in conversation with the original ledger artists and geometric expressionists, but with contemporaries like St. Thomas-born painter Hasani Sahlehe, whose glossy acrylic tableaux channel universal architectures and sounds, and Belgian artist Ria Bosman, whose minimal tapestries speak to spiritual states. Last Gun’s artistic statement notes Blackfoot aesthetics and archaeology, as well as “the ancient human narrative of North America” and “petroglyphs, pictographs, pictorial imagery, rocks, rock formations, and glacial erratics,” further linking his work to holistic concepts and nature. Fresh in their confidence and immediacy, his drawings present something eternal in dialogue with recent history. Doors and windows serve as invitations to alternative ways of seeing, offering perspective and some kind of peace. Last Gun’s work is among the rare transcendent oeuvres responding directly to a widespread ache for something reverent, whole, and meaningful.
Installation view of Terran Last Gun: Visual Reaffirmation at Chapter NY.
Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York. Photo credit: Charles Benton.
Visual Reaffirmation is on view at Chapter NY from February 28 through April 12, 2025.
[1] For further reading, see Mary Stout and Helen Dwyer, Blackfoot History and Culture (New York: Gareth Stevens, 2012).
[2] Gong Yushu, “The Sumerian Account of the Invention of Writing—A New Interpretation,” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 2, no. 5 (2010): 7446–7453.
