“The European-American history of the Hudson is just a moment in the great sweep of geological and native time in the Hudson Valley” – Stephen Stanne, Stephen, Roger Panetta and Brian Forist. The Hudson: An Illustrated Guide to the Living River

The indigenous people of the Hudson Valley were among the earliest in North America to be displaced from their land by European colonizers. Most published narrative accounts of New York and the Hudson Valley, even those running to a thousand pages or more, dedicate less than a dozen pages to representing indigenous experience in the region. Muhheakantuck examines the brief but disastrous forty years when the Leni Lenape came into contact with the corporate entity known as the Dutch West India Company.

Are the categories of history and cartography adequate to describe the Hudson River and its valley as a space and as a place? Muhheakantuck: Everything Has a Name juxtaposes these two means of description—historical narrative, and geographic mapping — in order to analyze ways that the Hudson River has been and could be historicized and mapped. How does a map construct its viewer? What happens to real space when it is abstracted through cartography?

The 40 minute film consists of two real-time aerial views of the Hudson River. The first depicts the lower harbor and East bank of the river. The second retraces the journey down river affording a view of the West bank ending at Ellis Island and the statue of liberty.

At their most extreme, mapping and narrative represent the desire and attempt to master space and time through totalization. But other more critical concepts and practices of “totality” work to discover hidden connections between seemingly unrelated spheres of influence and interaction.

Matthew Buckingham’s films and installations have been shown extensively in galleries and museums in North America and Europe including solo shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, the Statens Musem for Kunst, Copenhagen, the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna and the Dallas Museum of Art.  He is a 2004-2005 Freund fellow at Washington University, St. Louis. This is his fourth solo exhibition at Murray Guy.

Muhheakantuck – Everything has a Name was commissioned by Minetta Brook and shown in the summer of 2003 in Beacon, NY as part of Watershed: The Hudson Valley Art Project.