Description
Arrow Head Collector reimagines a familiar Long Island pastime—the search for arrowheads along the shoreline—through a subversive Indigenous lens. In this staged scene, a local resident wades through shallow water, scanning the sand for traces of the past. But instead of a small, inert artifact, they stumble upon something alive: a full arrow, freshly released, and the presence of Native figures watching from the landscape. The encounter disrupts the colonial fantasy of safe, distant history, confronting the viewer with the reality that Indigenous life and resistance are not relics of the past, but active and present.
Through a blend of humor and tension, Jeremy Dennis transforms a hobby rooted in nostalgia and curiosity into a powerful meditation on visibility, ownership, and cultural memory. The figure of the “arrowhead collector” becomes symbolic of a broader desire to possess fragments of Indigenous history—without acknowledging the living people to whom those fragments belong. The arrow’s return, mid-flight, suggests an interruption of that narrative: the land itself, and those tied to it, are not silent witnesses but active agents reclaiming their story.
Like much of Dennis’s Rise series, Arrow Head Collector plays with time and myth, collapsing past and present to expose the contradictions of American identity. The work asks viewers to reconsider their relationship to the land, to the artifacts they romanticize, and to the Indigenous histories that remain embedded—often uneasily—beneath their feet.
