Sáandlaanaay (Kimberly Fulton Orozco): The 7th Time

Open Source Gallery presents The 7th Time, a fully inhabitable installation by Sáandlaanaay (Kimberly Fulton Orozco).

Seven is the number of times, on average, it takes a person to leave an abusive relationship. The 7th Time is an installation by interdisciplinary artist Sáandlaanaay. It tells the story of the labor of leaving and the interior strength required to imagine a different life before that life exists outside a person’s own body.

The gallery is transformed into a room that looks familiar. A relative’s kitchen. A friend’s living room. The house of a neighbor whose door you could knock on. Visitors are invited to sit, to make coffee, to handle the books on the shelf, to listen to the tapes left playing. The room asks nothing of anyone who enters it. It does not require an audience to decode it to experience familiarity.

This everyday room presents a deeper experience as an extension of the body, built out of what is at hand, with a spirit of survival, and not without fear. Family photographs, growing plants, children’s drawings, and works in progress form constellations of inheritance where ancestors, descendants and the earth itself turn slowly inside four walls. Everything else gathered here was gathered the way people who have had to start over gather what they need: one object at a time, from what is free, given, or secondhand. That same logic lives in Haida regalia-making, passed forward at a kitchen table, the same way the artist’s grandmother taught her to sew and where knowing happens through listening and handwork.

This place is an interior monument of survivance at a personal scale, built in the gaps between tending growing children and teasing threads of ancestral connection. None of these labors ever fully stops for the other. In this familiar, domestic space, Fulton Orozco places the viewer in an environment that is simultaneously one of violence and comfort, exposing the complexity of why it can be so hard to escape abuse. The act of “moving into,” the gallery space is an act of liberation and a somatic performance of setting oneself free from inhabited fear.

The 7th Time grows out of The Space We Story, staged within Jeffrey Gibson’s Indigenous Art School at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and continues Sáandlaanaay’s ongoing engagement with Sherry Farrell Racette’s “Kitchen Table Logic,” the theoretical writings of Dian Million, Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance, and the wider field of feminist Native abstraction. 

Sáandlaanaay, Kimberly Fulton Orozco, is a Kaigani Haida Raven of the Yakhw’ Jaanaas clan and a citizen of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Working across Mexican, Haida, and Scottish inheritance, her practice transforms objects of memory into statements of cultural endurance and self-determination. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a BFA from Georgia State University.