2021 Artist Bios and Project Descriptions
Julia uses her autobiographical circumstances to shape her practice. Currently, she is exploring play with her children, and piecing together a homeschool preschool curriculum for them with her husband, Matt, based on the alphabet. She hopes sharing these ideas through the Sou’wester residency will inspire others.
Mike’s fascination with the ocean has been around since childhood. Considering that, he’s combining education and illustration to bring the ocean into his illustration work: 26 creatures, 26 cutouts, straight through the entire alphabet creating an outdoor gallery/science museum on the Sou’wester grounds.
Nicholas is documenting field recordings from the Sou’wester and surrounding areas and creating a musical accompaniment that reflects the mood of the aural environment. At the end of the week he is performing those pieces.
Joey Binhammer and Kate Kilbourne
he/him and she/her
Music Performance Collaborative: Crowey
Portland, OR
Crowey is a psychedelic/folk soundscape duo known for their sweeping vistas of finger-style guitar, strings and looped harmonies. They are crafting a set of ambient music that deals with themes of pandemic fatigue, isolation, and the struggle to meditate through such a chaotic and uncertain world.
“Everyday, Recently” is a meditative practice of ‘being present’ in a place, and documenting daily changes in the Peninsula. Her project will be site-response; she will be attaching photo works to wood stakes, to form sculptural pieces, and placing them in the landscape to heighten the viewers relationship to place.
Lindsay Clark is focusing on new facets of her creative work including personal lyric essay, poetry and instrumental composition, as well as forthcoming collections of song. Primarily a musician, she works within the realm of folk music and is influenced by classical music, finger style guitar, language and environment.
Jenny is composing accordion music inspired by The Ingoldsby Legends, a set of folk tales penned by English writer Thomas Ingoldsby published in 1847. She is creating seven pieces of music, recorded and written into a score.
Kathleen is creating five pieces using naturally dyed fibers, nails and wood. She allows the plants to guide her in the creation of an herbal bath blend for each piece. People are invited to view the installation and take a blend with them to continually engage with the experience.
In her creative practice, Carolyn Hazel Drake uses images and symbols from folktales, myths, and the surrounding world. She will create a hand-stitched burial shroud for the year 2020, hoping to channel fear, sadness, joy, anger, and loss towards catharsis as we collectively process the past year.
Untitled Destabilization Piece explores the myriad systems and systemic issues that often threaten to plague, overwhelm, and disempower us while forming the ethos of the American spirit in the impossible task of the “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. How do we keep each other down while trying to lift ourselves up?
This new artists collective, fostered by Alice Gosti is collaborating on a new site-specific and site-responsive dance film for one of the vintage trailers. Alice creates dance films inspired both by the architecture and the history of a place.
Midori Hirose, Darcy Neal, Athena Edison-Lahm, Eric Pugh
we/us
Trash Hackers Collective: Grassroots Education and Community Empowerment
Portland, OR
Tour with Trash Hackers Collective as they re-imagine disposable waste-destined plastics as a raw, valuable resource. For Sou’wester ARTS WEEK 2021 they are going mobile, bringing a sculpture gallery and interactive recycling unit process out of the studio and into communities directly.
What happens when two people who played basketball in-person once, but who collaborate in writing thousands of miles apart, suddenly find themselves together in a new place, attempting to be archeologist filmmakers? This thrilling narrative explores the insoluble ambiguities of authenticity, art, identity and possession.
Erinn Kathryn, Drew Laughery, Jen LaMastra, and Chandra Glaeseman
Bimble Gallery Projects: Experimental Participatory Public Art
Portland, OR
Each morning we take our rollicking rally out on the streets in live advertisement-teasers and previews to entice. Join in daily 2-5pm. Find the Bimble Gallery flag a’waving, our Sou’wester trailer grounds becomes your art studio for making, musing, escaping, relishing in the absurd for a time.
Join in The GIFT: A conceptual scavenger hunt exploring the liminal space between internal/external, thought/action. Together, we shall cumulatively gather the pieces of our collective landscape. When we choose to be both the watcher and performer, we give ourselves (and others) the ultimate gift of curiosity and intention.
Mari Livie, Jess Land, Nate Beard, Ross Anderson, Jordan Bentz
she/her
Creative Engagement Lab: Multimedia Collaboration
Eugene, OR
We’re grappling with questions around OBSERVING, delighting in, and RECEIVING space. What will we find if we access our most attentive selves? What’s hidden beneath initial impressions? When we exercise deep looking, active listening, and our sense of embodied play, what can we discover about the space we’re exploring?
Amanda Manitach creates large-scale, text-based drawings that pay homage to the sprawl of sea and the area’s rich historical and natural curiosities. During the week she is also facilitating an Anonymous Art Postal Portal where artists may pick up and drop off love letters to the sea.
Heather McLaughlin and Kathryn MacCrate
she/her
Collaborative Multi-media Installation: III
Portland, OR
“To Reconvene,” invokes feelings of relationships, ritual, and the unknown. It incites reflections on life; past, present, and future. ‘Collaboration III’ is an on-site, multi-media installation. Whether by day or night, we invite you to stroll through, absorb, and transport yourself to wherever you need to be.
Green Hills Alone is a musical identity committed to the exploration of magic, elevated consciousness, love, yoga, mantra & spiritual liberation. It is an act of service to our Mother Earth, to wake up and sing, like a garden of flowers. This week it includes Chris Miller and Joseph Anderson.
FRED is the creative project of Seattle-based Gabriel Molinaro; a songwriter, session musician, and member of other local projects Moon Palace and Timothy Robert Graham. FRED released their first single in 2020 and will begin releasing songs from their upcoming album spring of this year.
Phoebe Moore presents a collection of video art animation on her windows. Her work is playful, dark, colorful and tactile. It looks for ugly in the beautiful and tenderness in cold images. Her piece for Sou’wester ARTS WEEK incorporates claymation, hand drawn animation and digital film.
NASHCO will collaborate with the resident artists to create narrative portraiture that highlights the environment and theme of renewal after a time of pause caused by the pandemic. The goal is images that show the physical manifestation of the expression of their art. This will culminate in a gallery show.
A humorous, curious combination of puppet show and week-in-the-life-of journal entries. Enjoy as handmade papier-mâché puppets recreate and celebrate small moments and human (and non-human) encounters for you on a stage.
Hilary Pfeifer is creating intimate sculptural installations inspired by polypores–fungi that grow in a shelf-like formation on trees. Polypores play a very significant role in forest ecosystems and are under threat of extinction due to logging and deforestation in the region.
Sacred Mirrors is an immersive multimedia installation created by multi-disciplinary artist, Amelia (Mealz) Ralston-Okabayashi. Using the theme of whimsical illusion to distort conventional perceptions, Sacred Mirrors will startle viewers with unpredictable physical circumstances sending them into altered states in order to confront their own reality.
Bobbie Robinson and Jordan Badger
she/her and he/him
Collaborative Audio-Visual Performance: UNDERWATER MICROPHONE
Boulder, UT
Underwater Microphone is a recording and performance project that sources sights and sounds from distinct environments that are then re-imagined through digital manipulation and musical accompaniment. Offering a meditation on place, Underwater Microphone aims to create an immersive interpretation of the Washington coast.
Eliza Roddy/Farewell Ceramics will pit fire a collection of funerary urns on the beach. Both a chemistry experiment and a grief ritual, the urn surfaces will be colored by the fire contents and atmosphere. Visitors are invited to write messages to the departed to be included in the fire.
This project is a reduction drawing, with lines carved into thick layered pigments. Each step of the process is documented in photographs, compiled into stop-motion film, layered with locally gathered sounds, and projected in light onto suspended space.
Inspired by the strange and sometimes mystical body of knowledge embedded in the work of care-takers, baby-whisperers, and fixers, Samuel Wildman is excited to make objects and interventions at the Sou’wester that will bring together disparate and visually incongruent things to perform absurd functions
For hundreds of years, the path of the labyrinth has provided a blueprint for self-reflection and discovery. The labyrinth is a walking meditation, a mandala of the mind. Find the various designs at and nearby the Sou’wester grounds. The threshold awaits; take the first step.
Eco-Poetic site specific and time-based installation using poetry and naturally occurring and abundant local flora such as the long seagrass of the Seaview coast. This project will evolve over the residency time-frame and set shore-side for an ocean spell.
she/they
Sharing the Shuttle: A Collaborative Weaving Project
Portland, OR
Through Sharing the Shuttle, Cynthia balances intuitive making with the therapeutic benefits of collaborative weaving. We weave trust through the support of the warp and the expression of the weft. Using the loom as both metaphor and tactile way to move through the isolation of past trauma.
Artist Biographies and Project Descriptions
Julia Barbee Biography and Project Description: The constraints of her autobiographical journey inform artist Julia Barbee’s subjects and material choices. She has worked with wearable sculpture, performance, film, food, social media, photography, retail space, and the written word. Currently, she is exploring play with her children, and piecing together a homeschool preschool curriculum for them with her husband based on the alphabet. On many special occasions she makes pavlovas for gatherings, often documenting the vanitas aftermath. With her husband and a friend, she co-founded and curated a five-year running art event called Spaceness. She has an MFA in fiber, and has been working in Portland, Oregon for almost two decades where she lives with her husband and two children. I would like to do a continuation of both of my recent residencies there, working on projects that include children, but based more on a preschool/homeschool theme. With the advent of Covid, my husband Matt and I were introduced to the challenges of creating preschool curriculum from home. We chose the alphabet as our theme. I’d like to share some of what we came up with, and create some new options on the grounds as well. Hoping to inspire parents looking ahead to a spring and summer of distancing, and how we coped with circumstances using materials we had at home, and exploring nature wherever we found ourselves.
Mike Bennett Biography and Project Description: Hi! My name is Mike Bennett and I’ve always considered myself an illustrator. I went to college to become an Art Educator, but about three years ago I started making giant wooden cutouts out of reclaimed wood and painted with recycled house paint. I spent a majority of my time making mass scavenger hunts that would send folks around the city to find my art – the cool thing is, they get to keep it when they find it! Once the pandemic hit, I felt a need to shift my work. I noticed countless families going on walks every day. I decided to create a growing/evolving art installation in front of my home. A new animal every day, straight through the alphabet. I made an educational video for each animal and had droves of people walking by every single day! I’ll never forget the memories I made at the “A to Zoo.” Since then, I’ve taken this outdoor art gallery/science museum to the world of the dinosaurs, a bug museum, the legends of crypto-zoology and, currently, extinct animals! I have so many more ideas – I’m excited that I’ve only just begun! During the residency week, I’d love to tackle a display featuring the animals of Washington. Birds, mammals, fish, bugs, amphibians and reptiles. Ideally, I make an entire alphabet in just 7 days! During my week there, I’d love to find a home for the display so families can visit it in Washington. I’d, of course, be using reclaimed wood and house paint for everything.
Nicolas Bindeman Biography and Project Description: For a long as I can remember I’ve felt extra sensitive to the sounds in my environment. Music, obviously, but also the tiniest of scratches, rattles, hisses, thuds and swishes, all of which tickle my mind, sometimes pleasurably, but just as often leaving me irked, desiring more silence, more space. It’s this desire that has lead me to an infatuation with atmosphere, ambiance, aesthetics, a vibe; for me what it boils down to though is control over a particular environment. Choosing the right sounds, the right timbres, to create the “right” environment. A big part of any real world space is sound. A swirling array of birds, wind, cars, rain, people, all existing in a chaotic earthly blend. Rarely do we experience true silence in our everyday lives. Recorded sound atmospheres often strive for clean, unwordly, environments. My interest at the moment is specifically in marrying the sounds of our everyday environments with musical/tonal elements.My aim is to continue explorations, which I began during my recent residency at the Sou’wester, thru the making of field recordings of nearby surroundings, both in nature and in town so to speak. Then to combine those with musical elements that aim to specifically allow breathing room and balance to those natural sounds. In essence, to create an amalgamation of these parts, a furniture music of and for the Sou’wester. As a performance I’d like to invite people into my studio space (or pavilion), and while a microphone is placed outside, picking up everything happening in the moment, I will be inside creating a live soundtrack, blending those environments and in the process drawing more acute attention to the sounds occurring outside while re-contextualizing them into a musical sound scape.
Joey Binhammer and Kate Kilbourne Biography and Project Description: My name is Joey and my artistic career began as a child in the mud, sculpting gourmet food for a pretend restaurant that lived so strongly in my imagination it might as well have been real. It was around this time that I started writing songs on a green dinosaur toy piano, the first stepping stone on a 20+ year progression that has come to be called “Crowey”. Together with my bandmate Kate Kilbourne, a music graduate of PSU and lifelong musician/multi-
Laura Halsey Brown Biography and Project Description: Laura Halsey Brown is an intra-disciplinary artist presently based on the Washington coast. She has worked nationally/internationally, and as senseofplace LAB. Her present work incorporates influences such as place, site, Buddhism and Arte Povera; the 1970’s Italian movement focused on using materials of the ‘poor’. She received her MFA from California Institute for the Arts then moved to New York City, where she showed her installations and moving image works at venues such as New Museum (as part of a 2001 LMCC World Trade Center residency), White Columns and Art in General. She has curated media programs for venues internationally, including The Kitchen and The Knitting Factory (NYC), Woodstock Center for Photography (NY), Philadelphia Center for the Arts (PA) and Art House (Dublin). She moved to Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 2002 and received a Stimurlingsfonds poor Architecture grant to create public art works that focused on local architecture, and architects and the public having a voice in ‘their’ architecture. In 2007, she moved to San Francisco and started senseofplace LAB based on her research. She has received grants nationally and internationally; awards such as being included in the 2012 Mastermind Award Exhibition; prizes such as the Jurors Choice Award for a photograph exhibition juried by Sandra Phillips, PhotographyCurator Emeritus of SFMOMA. In 2018, she has a solo exhibition at the Adobe Gallery in San Francisco. Her works are included in national and international collections. In 2020, she was diagnosed with autism, and is presently re-framing past works through this new lens to create an artist book. It will include continuing the ‘speaking in public’ series as memoir, and processing the experiences in/of places she’s been. I live in Long Beach so I wouldn’t need a studio space but I’d love to be considered to do a site-specific work. Since last February, I’ve been taking photos everyday in the Peninsula landscape. The first two months were at Waikiki Beach as I was a Camp Host at Cape Disappointment. Each month since has had a different focus. I’d like to use the images taken for this project to create a site-specific installation. I’d like to base the creation of a multi-media site-specific work using these images as well as other (found) materials. I’m thinking about printing the images on other materials such as fabric or cardboard.
Lindsay Clark Biography and Project Description: Lindsay Clark finds balance between traditional and english folk, country, and her own version of experimental folk that seems to come from her soul. Exquisite and pitch perfect, her music speaks of quiet revelation, with a background of (usually her own) multi-tracked vocal arrangements. With influences ranging from the Beach Boys, Elizabeth Cotton, Joni Mitchell, Appalachian folk, her classical upbringing, and her father’s record collection, she blends many worlds into a uniquely warm sound. She has carved out a vibrant place as an artist with a penchant for poetry, rich harmony, and a style of self-taught fingerpicking influenced by Nick Drake, John Fahey, and others. Originally from the small gold rush town of Nevada City, CA, she now resides in Portland, OR. Her sound has been described as “folk with angelic vocals washing over smooth edges” (1859 Magazine). She has shared the stage with musicians such as Alela Diane, Nat Baldwin (Dirty Projectors), Ryan Francesconi (Joanna Newsom), Laura Gibson, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Her most recent effort was engineered / co-produced with Jeremy Harris (Vetiver/Devendra Banhart). “Crystalline” was released in fall 2018 via Oscarson (Germany). Currently working on upcoming full-length album, to eb released 2021. She is also working on forthcoming collections of personal essays, poetry and instrumental works. During this residency period, I would love to spend time working on collections of short personal essay, poetry, and instrumental music. During a typical year, I tend to be creatively consumed with the regular tasks of booking, writing, and recording. With this year, I have been allowed more space to explore my voice through other mediums, while continuing to work on an album that is tentatively planned for release in 2021. I’m grateful for these rare moments and would benefit so much from focused time. I imagine spending the days working between projects of poems, lyric essay, and time spent with my guitar and piano. I am interested in how these quieter forms, without my singing voice, might take shape and how they might influence my current and future work. The Sou’wester has always been a place of inspiration and connection, Arts Week 2020 was formative for me and I would love the opportunity to return to this place of communion.
Jenny Conlee-Drizos Biography and Project Description: I am a pianist and accordionist from Portland, OR. I am a member of The Decemberists and also play with other bands such as the Minus 5, Casey Neill and the Norway Rats, and my own group The Jenny Conlee Quartet. I am also a music teacher and compose music for film. I would like to write some accordion music based on folktales. I work well having a story to follow, and I would like to experiment using folktales as the background for the music.
Kathleen Coulton Biography and Project Description: Kate Coulton has forged an inspired career as a medicine maker, plant cultivator, educator, caregiver, and artisan. Kate is driven by a reverence for the creative and therapeutic potential of all living organisms. Through collaborative projects that involve natural fiber dyeing, herbal remedy crafting, and personal empowerment, she encourages thoughtful interaction with the abundant flora. Gratitude and accessibility are at the core of her practice. I want to create 5 pieces of art with wood, nails and yarn. The wood holds the foundation, the nails hold the structure and the yarn holds the depth. Then allow the piece inspire a bath blend and the bath to inspire a poem. This is a new project I have been dreaming up for a long time.
Carolyn Hazel Drake Biography and Project Description: Carolyn Hazel Drake is a third-generation Oregonian from a long line of craftswomen. Her creativity was cultivated early on in her mother’s quilt store, as was her appreciation for handwork and being a part of a community of makers. Her creative process involves hand-dyeing cotton and wool with natural plant materials and using scraps of fabric and leftover edges from cut shapes in cloth and clay to build compositions. Her art explores the relationships between domesticity, personal histories, and memory by pairing material fragments with common visual characteristics and manipulating them until they are transformed. Her imagery references folklore, archetypes, and language. Drake studied Literature & Architecture at Portland State University’s Honors College and spent a term as a curatorial research & writing intern for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with a particular focus on sculpture. She teaches art workshops out of her studio and across the Pacific Northwest. She taught visual art, art history, and language arts for over a decade in Oregon public schools. She is currently the PPS Visual & Performing Arts Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA), where she engages in advocacy and supports best practice and professional development for the nearly one hundred visual arts specialists in the district. Since 2018, Drake has been awarded a GLEAN residency, a Leland Ironworks residency, and a Suttle Lodge residency, and is a member of the Portland Art Museum’s Teacher Advisory Council. She intends to create a burial shroud for the year 2020, using symbols and icons that stand in for personal and societal elements and events that defined the year. This piece will be in a similar style as her current work (wool applique on cotton) but in a different proportion and palette. She hopes that stitching the piece will be cathartic and, for the viewer, create an opportunity to find or recognize humor, joy, fear, sadness, anger and loss as we collectively try and process 2020 and look ahead to 2021.
Mary Ferrario and William Brattain Biography and Project Description: Etiquette is a contemporary performance art collaboration born from the divergent disciplines of playwriting and choreography. Etiquette strives to create work that is considerate, accessible, and sustainable, as well as to be engaging and inspirational for artists and audiences alike. After presenting our prior show, Comfort Objects, at Sou’wester Arts Week 2020, we immediately returned to Seattle and went into quarantine, meeting and commiserating over Zoom while we watched the world seemingly fall apart, perhaps reassembelling itself from the devil we know into the devil we don’t. Untitled Destabilization Piece explores the myriad systems and systemic issues that often threaten to plague, overwhelm, and disempower us. In many ways, this piece begins at the same point as Comfort Objects and also from where it left off. Beginning with the Law of Attraction that rests at the heart of the multi-level marketing scheme, we are exploring how this concept and the philosophy it derives from forms the ethos of the American spirit in the form of the impossible task of the “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Additional concepts include: Facebook/Cambridge Analytica, the Attention Economy, Economic Inequality/Political Polarity (intrinsically linked), Evangelical Republicans, Puritans, Transcendentalism, Transhumanism, Motivational Seminars, Antiracism, Land Dedications, Unknowability, Utopian and Intentional Communities, and Ecology. As our sophomore project together as a collaboration, in many ways we are seeking to continue to define our aesthetic and artistic process: we anticipate this project having an inverse ratio of movement to dialogue as Comfort Objects did, and seek to create an internal logic within the choreography. We would like to explore more multimedia elements within this performance and would like to create a soundscape of field recordings in the natural environment of the Sou’Wester. We also want to leave more room for space and growth for ourselves than we did last year, and avail ourselves of the extended time and space to work with one another in new and surprising ways.
Alice Gosti Biography and Project Description: Alice Gosti (she/her) is an Italian-American immigrant choreographer, hybrid performance artist, curator, DJ, and architect of experiences. She is based out of occupied Duwamish and Coast Salish land, now named Seattle. Raised in a bi-cultural family of installation architects, her performances live and breathe the dualities within a multicultural environment. Alice works simultaneously with film, installation, wearable art, sound, poetry, digital platforms, and audience interaction to create durational performances integral to their non-traditional sites, to create cultural moments for audiences from one to 15,000. Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards and residencies. Gosti’s work has been commissioned and presented nationally and Internationally in universities, theaters, museums and galleries. I am interested in making a site-specific experimental dance performance. The event will also be filmed, so that it will also have a film artifact. The site-specific work that we make with my company MALACARNE uses movement to experience architecture, history and politics of a time and space. When ever I see photos from Sou’Wester I get inspired by the personality of your trailers and I immediately see bodies moving, relating and responding to the architecture. What is the contemporary story of trailer culture that needs to be told and can be told only using movement?
Midori Hirose, Darcy Neal, Athena Edison-Lahm, Eric Pugh (Alice Rotsztain and Emma Prichard are part of this collective but are not attending ARTS WEEK) Biography and Project Description: Trash Hackers is a collective of artists, technologists, engineers, designers, educators committed to responsible DIY plastic recycling, education, documentation, and user-friendly tools. Trash Hackers Collective will provide a roaming artistic platform to change attitudes towards the disposal of plastic. This residency will include pieces made with disposed materials sourced from beach walks. Reimagining disposable waste-destined plastics as a raw, valuable resource we will highlight the process by making molds and extruded studies of local flora and waste. From this we will create a body of sculptural examples from plastic waste we recycle with custom machinery. Touring with this mobile sculpture gallery and interactive recycling unit brings this process out of our studio to communities directly. With Covid-safety in mind, participants and internet onlookers are invited to experience creative empowerment through material transformation: from waste to raw material to art objects.
Mikey Kampmann and Travis Woolsey: Biography and Project Description: Mikey Kampmann is an American comedian and filmmaker. He is known for his existential-style humor. He made his acting debut on the television show Portlandia. His other acting credits include Baskets (FX), and the upcoming Made for Love (HBO Max). He has toured regularly with the comedians TIm and Eric. Mikey worked as director Kelly Reichardt’s personal assistant on 2020’s award-nominated film First Cow. He has directed music videos for Little Wings and Bill Callahan. WIth Doug Lussenhop, he co-created the low-fi absurdist group 2 Wet Crew. Together they have co-written and co-directed over 20 short films. Mikey was also the breakfast cook at the South Pole Station in Antarctica and worked the night shift at the M&M chocolate factory. Working in collaboration with Travis Woolsey, we will make a short film rooted or inspired by a historical story or mythology of the Long Beach area. We will start by sourcing a short story from the period of 1600s to 1970s, something that can be easily told with little to no cast. We will score the film using music written and recorded on previous trips to Sou’wester.
Erinn Kathryn, Drew Laughery, Jen LaMastra, and Chandra Glaeseman: Biography and Project Description: Born from a found metal vessel, Bimble (meaning ‘to meander’) Gallery was created in the depths of COVID, when engagement with others was frozen and the world outside of our own cocoons felt scary, serious, uncertain and inaccessible. The gallery represents our experiences of 2020 through the lens of COVID: the reactions we had, both collectively and individually, and the ways we found moments of humor, solace, generosity, compassion, and creativity simply by being a collective body rather than an individual. Building something together felt like forward movement; some small action within all the inaction. Bimble Gallery literally moves. As the gallery travels from site to site, it energizes the space it inhabits. It requests and requires that the viewer get close, to step out of the present moment and into the experience of miniature, transient, humorous, and slightly absurd– arguably the kind of experience we all need right now. After this past year of fear, unknowns, and isolation spurred on by the coronavirus pandemic, we want to encourage connection again. One way people connect is through storytelling. Our project, Making Stories, offers daily creative acts that infuse objects with narrative. Each morning, we will solicit participation in the day’s activity through playful engagement tactics (i.e. leaving messages on doorsteps, having a pots-and-pans-parade on the beach, handing out balloons labeled with the daily activity/location/time). When participants arrive at our trailer-turned-studio, they will contribute their part to a collaborative activity (construct an exquisite-corpse-style poem, build a found object sculpture, build Calder-mobiles from beach plastic). The day’s completed project will be showcased in our mobile gallery, Bimble Gallery (Instagram: @bimblegallery), for the following day– in downtown Long Beach, right on the strip. This satellite exhibition space will enable chance art encounters and act as an echo chamber, sending more participants our way.
Michelle Kline and Frankie Darling: Biography and Project Description: Uncomfortable Club (Michelle Kline) is the culmination of art, performance, music, vulnerability, interaction and an obsession with the wondrous workings of the human brain. Join the club! Let us help each other evolve as the perfectly flawed and extraordinary human beings we are meant to be. Frankie Darling is a photographer, poet and herbalist that spends as much time creating free-association artwork as trying to wrangle their wildness in for some lessons in grace and quietude. She currently resides on the banks of Occupied Duwamish Territories of the Puget Sound, Washington. Title: THE GIFT We will be working on a conceptual scavenger hunt for the weekend participants (and artists during the week). Together we will create a minimalist map of the peninsula with directions to the first location somewhere in nature (keeping in mind not to disturb the area or the surroundings). Each participant will gather a specific item from each location (or something that we intentionally leave at each spot) Consecutive locations will contain a clue or directions to the next destination, thus creating a fun way for participants to explore the peninsula on foot. (and give artists an opportunity to take a break during the week if needed) Each person will receive a large cotton tote with some sort of image that we’ll be be painting/printing on it for scavenged items (that they get to keep!) At the end of the walk, each participant will add their gathered items to some sort of shrine that will be in the form of a circle or half circle which will effectively become our performance spot. The piece will culminate in a short performance inside the circle/shrine. The physical aspect of our piece will evolve and change throughout the week as items are gathered and added. The gathering/scavenger hunt is not time sensitive, but should only take roughly an hour (or more if someone wants to take their time or meander a bit?) The inspiration for this piece stems from the idea that mindfulness is ultimately the intentional practice of allowing the discomfort of being both the artist and audience simultaneously in our lives, either while interacting with our fellow human beings or retreating in solitude. In doing so, we give ourselves (and hopefully others) a gift – one of curiosity, intention and compassion. Our performance is the mirroring of the individual, split into 2 as both artist and audience – an exploration of the liminal space between internal/external, reaction/intention. Ultimately, an expression of what one’s internal landscape might look and sound like at any given moment.
Mari Livie: Biography and Project Description: We are a team of Artist/Educators who, after working together on a grant-funded Arts in Education project for four years, recognized that our shared philosophies around creativity and the arts, and our mutual love for one another is a promising recipe for meaningful collaborative discovery. The four of us formed Creative Engagement Lab two years ago. We are dedicated to revealing and strengthening the creative capacities of public school teachers and staff (or any willing humans, really), so they can nurture and support the creative capacities of their students, colleagues, families, and fellow community members. We passionately believe in the power of creative work, as a tool for identity formation, expanding perspectives, furthering social justice imperatives, activating environmental awareness, cultivating belonging, and supporting competencies across domains. We engage with visual, musical, theatre, and dance practices in an online format and (before Covid) with live experiential workshops. We are fueled by metaphors, space for uncertainty, and being playful together. We’ve all been somewhat hunkered down over the last year. Traveling less, working from home, spending more time in our kitchens, our living rooms, or our backyards (if we are fortunate enough to have them). One of the glittering gems that has risen to the surface from all this sheltering in place, is a new emerging intimacy with these spaces we daily inhabit. We are birdwatching from our couches, experimenting with bread baking in our once cold kitchens, and walking neighborhood routes with a new regularity. I personally have rediscovered the mighty Willamette river, just a few blocks from my home. My daily walks along the river reveal patterns; the river’s swelling and receding water levels, the budding, blooming, darkening and desiccation of leaves in the massive cottonwoods attending it’s banks, the chorus of river dwellers: mallards, mergansers, beavers, and cormorants who know the river even most intimately. We are curious about the processes through which we come to know, adore, and map a space in our hearts and minds. We are curious about what kind of layered multi-sensory ‘map’ may emerge through the coalescence of a group of people with varying experiences & backgrounds interacting with that space. Our current large scale project is a federally funded grant we call makeSPACE. The name choice expresses how our work revolves around MAKING space (time, physical space, and emotional/intellectual space) for genuine engagement with the arts. For this proposal we are grappling with questions around OBSERVING, delighting in, and RECEIVING space. What will we find if we access our most attentive selves? What is hidden beneath initial impressions? When we exercise deep looking, active listening, and our sense of embodied play, what can we discover about the space we are exploring? How can we map that exploration in multimodal and multi-sensory expression with and for others? We intend to embrace 2 different spaces over the week, utilizing a collection of observation “tools” to creatively, and collaboratively engage. We strive to see and be in the space in novel ways.
We will be:
-documenting the color palate, textures, light quality of the space (isolation windows)
-documenting the soundscape (real audio recordings, and imagined – tiniest sound)
-asking who lives here? (animal, plant)
-interviewing residents, including trees
-finding/imagining the histories and the “now” stories of this place
-what is death and renewal in this place?
-documenting human interactions and interpretations of the visual space through drawing
-documenting human interactions and interpretations of the soundscape with recordings
-mapping the movements/trajectories of the space and what it contains
-mapping the monumental
-mapping the minuscule
-documenting embodied responses to the space (gesture, place based improv)
-exploring costuming, camouflage, dwellings
-generating proposals for redesigning or utilizing elements in the space
-naming things (lists, taxonomies)
Each investigation of a SPACE will produce a collection of:
-written impressions (stories, poems, lists, questions)
-illustrations
-place based multimodal, multi-sensory maps
-audio recordings (sounds collected from and sounds generated in response to the space)
-photographs and video of artifacts from the space and human response/interaction with the space
After observing (with the support of participants) and collecting we will edit, and produce a collage style video impression of each space. (2 SPACES) and exhibit a “thinking wall” styled map of our process.
potential schedule:
Day 1 (March 8th)
-tour the site and identify the 2 spaces
-assemble and prepare materials, prompts, and structures for the 2 locations
-meet other artists/participants
-distribute information about our project and how to participate/contribute
Day 2 (March 9th)
-engage with space 1 through stories, sounds, visual representations, visual qualities, improv, movement, and responsive evolving engagements
Day 3 (March 10th)
-Assemble and document artifacts from space 1
-edit/prepare video
Day 4 (March 11th)
-engage with space 2 through stories, sounds, visual representations, visual qualities, improv, movement, and responsive evolving engagements
Day 5 (March 12th)
-Assemble and document artifacts from space 2
-edit/prepare video
Day 6 (March 13th)
-engage with community
-share video and mappings
-distribute thank you gestures to participants and spaces
Amanda Manitach: Biography and Project Description: I am a self-taught multidisciplinary artist based out of Seattle, WA. Over the past decade my focus has included the practice of writing, curating, and visual art to generate and facilitate new works — both my own and those of other emerging artists. My main focus in recent years has been drawing: making both smaller pieces and large-scale (up to 30-foot-long rolls) I love to meld text-based content with pattern, incorporating aspects of the visceral, dirty, and humorous with the delicate and sublime. In addition to exhibiting my own work, I have served as curator of Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, and co-founded and co-directed multiple mixed-use arts spaces in Seattle. I am currently represented by Winston Wachter Fine Art in New York and Seattle. I have had the pleasure of spending multiple stints at the Sou’wester through the residency program, and in 2018 installed the “Pillow Talk” exhibit in the Art Trailer Gallery. LOVE LETTERS TO THE SEA: I will be working on 1-3 text-based drawings during the week which incorporate aspects of the surrounding area. I am also interested in extending this notion of love letters to the community during the week by creating a miniature art portal/gallery/exchange in the Sou’Wester shop area: I will provide 5×7 envelopes and a supply of 5×7 inch blank watercolor sheets that artists can take and then return, filled and sealed with secrets, poems, meanderings, drawings, dreams, etc inspired by the sea. In turn, people may take random, anonymous sealed envelopes to open and keep.
Heather McLaughlin and Kathryn MacCrate Biography and Project Description: Heather McLaughlin and Kathy MacCrate both currently reside in Portland, OR. Brought together by punk shows, dance performances and artistic vision, the two artists are now collaborating to create immersive art environments. Kathy is a multimedia artist and musician. Heather is a visual artist, art educator, performer and musician. Heather also runs a small art space and print shop called Lunar Phase Studio. Kathy MacCrate and Heather McLaughlin will create an immersive site specific sculptural environment and publication exploring themes of anatomy, nature, outer space, magic, and the world beyond. The installation will be an open air sculpture that the viewer can travel through. The environment is intended to be experienced anytime, day or night, rain or shine. When discussing the successes of their previous installations, Kathy and Heather both agreed the aspect of a changed environment that led to a joyous, wondrous, calm or introspective experience for the viewer was one of the greatest successes. The theme of the 2nd Annual Art Week, “To Reconvene,” invokes feelings of relationships, ritual and incites reflections on current events. The phrase “to reconvene with nature” also immediately comes to mind. For so many, the Sou’wester is already a place to reconvene with nature, art, family and friends. The two will use their previous successes and this year’s theme as their guide while building “Collaboration III” and creating their publication. The handmade publication, titled “To Summon Again” will contain vinyl elements and “narrative corpse” style drawings. A limited edition of the zines will either be available for sale or be used as a fundraising project for the installation. One zine will be dedicated to the Sou’wester archive.
Chris Miller Biography and Project Description: I am a musician and writer. I’ve release two full length albums under the name ‘Green Hills Alone’ (2014 and 2019). The last two year I’ve been exploring Sanskrit and mantra and using the opportunity to blend different understandings of sound, music and magic. I’ve enjoyed playing at Sou’wester a number of times the last few years and think it’s an amazing portal of creation. I want to use the opportunity to write and reflect, get near the ocean, put the last year in perspective and see and connect with other artists. I’d love to play a concert, and if it’s available I would take advantage of the recording trailer. I would enjoy making something fresh and inspired.
Gabriel Molinaro Biography and Project Description: I am a songwriter, recording artist, and (once upon a time) touring keyboardist. I currently am finishing up an album under the moniker FRED, named for my grandmother, Winifred. All of these songs were written while my mom was sick with cancer, and in the period after she died last year in October. They all revolve around grief in some way, and all the weird and unexpected things that come along with losing a parent. I am interested in the ways grief intersects with joy, and how that energy transforms over time and can be channeled into new directions. The songs themselves communicate this relationship between seemingly contradictory emotions in that many of them are accompanied by dance beats and are quite fun to move to. I will be adapting my current songs into a folk, acoustic format and filming them in the beautiful setting of Sou’wester! I am interested in how the songs change when presented in this different format. I’ll also be writing new songs for my next album.
Phoebe Moore Biography and Project Description: Works shown: Melbourne Underground Film Festival “Static” Official Selection 2019 Fall. Centrum’s Artist Residency Program 2019 Fall Directed a site specific Animation. Tiny Thunder Designs: Owner Operator 2013-Present Designs and produces unique jewelry. The Olympia Exquisite Corpse: Founder/Organizer 2010-Present A collaborative film relay race. SpaceWorks Tacoma: Streetside Display 2012 Multimedia window installation in downtown Tacoma Washington. Participant in PLOP: Performance Laboratory for Objects and Puppets ToySlam Festival Wrote, designed and performed a puppet show 2010-2011. Internships Fall 2006 Interned at the ArtRod art gallery in Tacoma. Summer 2010 Interned with Video Artist Vanessa Renwick in Portland Oregon. I would like to make a video or several videos and project them on the window of the trailer or cabin or room I’m in. I’d like the videos to reflect the beauty and vibe of Sou ‘wester and whatever I’m feeling that week so I’d like to keep the details a little vague so I have a lot of room for improvisation. I can see my work usually drifts to some kind of experimental animation. My videos are usually non narrative so people will be able to enjoy them as set pieces or ambient.
Leah Nash and Chris Onstott Biography and Project Description: Leah Nash (The Nash) and Chris Onstott (The CO) are an award-winning photography & motion duo that specialize in lifestyle imagery and narrative portraiture. We call our style ‘crafted reality,’ and basically it means…we make real people look cool. Both originally photojournalists, we take a moment-driven approach, capturing authentic imagery whether in life, at work, or on set. The result is graphic, storytelling photography that is full of color, light and intimacy. Not averse to dancing (Leah), telling dad jokes (Chris) or listening intently (both), our goal is to leave our subjects a little bit better than we found them. All the while creating a wealth of images that look and feel spontaneous. Our work has been honored by American Photography, ASMP, PDN Photo Annual, Photolucida’s Critical Mass, Pictures of the Year International, NPPA, The Magenta Foundation, SPJ and others. We feel darn proud to wrangle pixels for brands like Apple, Chase Bank, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, Metro, Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, and Marriott. We also work for a variety of editorial clients including National Geographic, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, NPR, and AARP. We propose a narrative portrait project involving the other artists using the theme of renewal. Collaborating with other artists who were interested, we will create situations that in some way speak to the artist and reveal something about them and the space. The images should feel timeless, each individual piece part of the larger body. Using lights and colored gels to give them an evocative and mysterious quality, the final project should feel like a story has been told. The project will examine artists in space during a time of Covid and use Edward Hopper as our influence.
Emily Pacheco Biography and Project Description: My work is certainly my daily practice in joy and playfulness. I began working with papier-mache approx. 1 year ago out of a burning desire to make use of all the extraneous paper of modern life. (You know, postcards from dentists and eye doctors, real estate notices, alumni newsletters addressed to old tenants who moved out in 2018…) As a result, I have been able to take my work less seriously and surrender to the chaos of my imagination, creating pieces that are a hodgepodge of images and iconography I like, jokes I’ve heard, and autobiographical references. This past year, I have made some of the largest and funnest pieces of my career! Perhaps all artists struggle to find the line between quality and debilitating perfectionism. For me, playfulness is the cool poetry teacher who provides her class (me) with compassion and freedom of expression. I propose to create a puppet show wherein I will make a papier-mache puppet version of myself along with several other characters based on beings I interact with during my residency week (likely a combination of humans, animals, and inanimate pals which I now have no problem befriending thanks to months of quarantine, ha!) The resulting script will be a series of scenes involving simple moments of connection I’ve had over the week, highlighting–NAY, CELEBRATING!–the specialness of interactions. Viewers will be able to perform scenes if they wish, and I will also do a full performance that will be streamed live. Show length should be approx. 10 minutes.
Hilary Pfeifer Biography and Project Description: My studio practice explores the ways that humans attempt to control nature, and in turn, nature finds a way to adapt or reassert itself–such as the grass that grows in the cracks of a sidewalk or mildew that forms on an uninsulated wall behind a couch. I express these struggles through craft-influenced sculpture and installations. My anthropomorphized organics live somewhere between humor and curiosity. A physical object is often the foundation of this work. I would like to create a dozen intimate sculptural installations inspired by polypores–fungi that grow in a shelf-like formation on trees. Regionally, polypores play a very significant role in nutrient cycling and carbon dioxide production of forest ecosystems. Polypores are much more diverse in old natural forests with abundant dead wood than in younger managed forests. Consequently, a number of species have declined drastically and are under threat of extinction due to logging and deforestation. I’m also interested in this theme because one particular polypore species is harvested by artists because the surface can be used as a substrate for drawing. My sculptures will be designed to attach to trees around the property.
Amelia Ralston-Okabavashi Biography and Project Description: Pacific Northwest based interdisciplinary artist, designer, musician, and mystic, Amelia Ralston-Okabayashi (aka Mealz) has been honing their skills as a technologist in order to produce interactive new media work that includes installation, experiential events, and multimedia. Originally an electronic musician with a background in digital production they have evolved their practice to include creative coding, electronic engineering, fabrication, experiential and generative art. They are currently exploring art processes that allow them to convey the interconnectivity of our existence with spiritual, biological and technological practices. Using tarot as one of their mediums they perform experiential improvised explorations to be self interpreted by each participant. Sacred Mirrors is a body of work exploring themes of projection, reflection, connection, and ontology. Using mirrors and technology I will be creating interactive sculptures that will be apart of a larger installation, an interactive mirror house. The intention behind this work is to invite viewers to explore new ways of imagining our connection with each other, our technologies, and our environment. The piece I will be working on at Souwester will be a small interactive mirror that reacts to someones reflection.
Bobbie Robinson and Jordan Badger Biography and Project Description: Hi! I’m Bobbie and I’m a multidisciplinary artist working with video, weaving, printmaking and bookmaking. When working with video, I collect footage (most often from the natural environment where we live, in rural southern Utah) that I manipulate and project while my partner Jordan performs music. Jordan uses hardware electronic instruments (synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, etc) that he accompanies with a stripped down drum kit, wedding acoustic and electronic sounds. Our live performances teeter between hypnotic, introspective ambient and upbeat, danceable rhythms and aim to be uplifting and immersive. While our aesthetic appears to be synthetic and futuristic, (electronic music with flashy, digitally-manipulated visuals) it is deeply rooted in the natural world, as we often sample (sights and sounds) from our environment. We want to scour the surrounding natural environment to collect video and audio (field recordings) that we will incorporate into a live performance at the end of arts week. We would likely spend a couple days out collecting sights/sounds, and a few days integrating them into a music performance that will be accompanied by live visual projections.
Eliza Roddy Biography and Project Description: I have always had mud on my hands, both in and outside of ceramic studios. I have been engaging with my ceramic practice consistently for five years. Ceramics has taught me how to take my best efforts and throw them into a fire to be improved or destroyed. The results are not up to me, I control only my input. I am attempting to apply this lesson to all parts of my life as I, certainly not alone, struggle to comprehend the massive failure to contain the spread of the coronavirus. There are so many bodies in need of resting places this year. I have shifted my ceramic focus to making urns because I consider it spiritual practice to find my small place in the solution. It is deeply meaningful for me to be able to use my art to honor someone’s life. Choosing to keep an urn in your home is choosing to create an altar to the person. To add elements for personal ritual my urns incorporate candle holders, single flower vases, or full bouquet vases. To include all sizes of human, my urns are infant/pet size up to very large adult/two person urn. My work is wheel thrown and altered with occasional handbuilt or carved pieces. I am inspired by architectural features, circles and links, and rituals. It is crucial for me to acknowledge that I am a white person using uncredited indigenous techniques on stolen land, and to have access to this is a privilege that I did not earn. The real history of this craft is an area that I am committed to growing my knowledge in, and incorporating action into my practice. To make art for the dead must include an acknowledgement that inequalities exist in death and in who is remembered. I would like to pit fire 10-15 ceramic funerary urns in a temporary kiln that I will dig on the beach. Pit firing is the oldest ceramic firing technique, no glaze is used and the surface color comes from the combustion of the materials surrounding the pieces. It is completely unpredictable and very beautiful. Salt is an important component of pit firing and produces a variety of colors and reactions, driftwood and seaweed and salty ocean air would become a part of these urns.
Andie Sterling Biography and Project Description: I am a woman with deep West Texas country roots, raised wild into a bloodline of pioneer women makers. I learned fiber arts, building, crafting, and foraging as life necessity skills very early in life. Adapting these techniques into fine art language to explore and convey my conceptual ideas bridges the span of who I am and who I am becoming. I am a collector of moments, fascinated with catching and documenting the sequencing of micro-events in passing time. I am proposing a multi-faceted project. First, a reduction drawing, in my aesthetic style, made by carving into a painted layered surface. Each step of this process will be recorded into images, then converted into a stop motion animation loop to be projected outdoors. Accompanying audio will be created from sound moments collected on site and composed into rhythmic patterns.
Samuel Wildman Biography and Project Description: Samuel Wildman is a reader, writer, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. He is a passionate and frequent collaborator and has received grants from 4Culture, SDOT, and City of Seattle Arts and Culture. Samuel has been awarded residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, Sou’wester Arts Week, Signal Fire, MADArt, and others. His work has been mentioned in Sculpture Magazine, The Seattle Times, the Stranger, Metropolitan Living, the Portland Mercury and was listed by Creative Capital On Our Radar. In my most recent exhibition, I made a series of objects and interventions using disparate and (sometimes) visually incongruent systems (plumbing system, shipping system, tiling system, lighting system) to do things they were most likely not intended to do. For example, I used plumbing supplies to make a cardboard box into a small portable fountain; I used tiles to protect disposable shopping bags; and a stone from the yard to mend a cracked stud in a load-bearing wall. I wanted to challenge existing systems (the systems that I know how to work with) to function contextually, in ways they were likely never intended to function, and to create openings for failure, revision, and sometimes success. But also to bring things together in new and unexpected ways. At the Sou’wester I’d like to continue this work, with an emphasis on the reparative, and possibly make some site specific interventions, and show some new pieces.
David Worthington Biography and Project Description: Over the years, I have realized that my artistic voice is not pinned down to one medium. I consider myself primarily a writer and photographer, but I also have a growing interest in immersive/experiential installation art. For my more official work, I am an educator; currently a substitute teacher, but I taught high school English for four years in the Midwest, where I am from. After leaving the classroom, I moved to NYC for two years of more rigorous photography experience and to branch out in my experiences of life. When I moved to Portland five years ago, I continued taking portraits, but I also returned to writing. I am an avid reader, and I’ve always felt like I had a book inside me. Bringing that vision into fruition over the past year has been hugely fulfilling for me. In fact, my stay as an Artist-in-Residence was pivotal in shaping Part Two of the novel I was working on, which I have since completed! It is the more immersive/experiential installation side of me that I will bring to Sou’wester Arts Week. I want to continue in the spirit of the cosmic labyrinth, my contribution to Spaceness in 2018. I will elaborate on this later in my proposal. As an artist, I am interested in exploring overlapping worlds and aesthetics that come together to reveal a liminal space, in which people can pause, be curious, and question. You will see this in my double exposure portrait work, my writing, and my labyrinth enthusiasm. I always aim to celebrate the sacred in other people and the world around us, often in vivid color. I also am in love with narrative as an immersive means to expand our understandings of the lived experience. Other fun information about me: I practice meditation daily, love tea & TV, and am always fully content out in nature. During my residency week, I will create 4-5 labyrinths at and nearby the Sou’wester. I will be bringing the cosmic labyrinth back out as well as painting another one with a path made out of footprints. I will be creating two other labyrinths: one made of stones in the woods behind the SouWester, accessible off of the path to the beach; a second made out of wood on the beach itself.
Ana Wyssmann Biography and Project Description: Ana Anu is a poet, multi-media artist and environmental educator. They have two published books of poetry, Noon (2017) and Mona Mona Mona (2019). Anu is currently an MFA candidate at Naropa University in Material Poetics and is working on large Eco-Poetic installations. Anu organizes Crones Councils of grandmothers from across the world and serves to distribute BIPOC scholarships on behalf of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. Their work with grandmothers largely informs their creative practice. Anu is working this year as a teaching artist at Naropa University to produce Eco Poetic installations with the Environmental Justice undergraduate students. Anu is also a Climate Fellow candidate through the U.S. Sustainability Policy Partnership. Ana’s primary artistic objective is to create poetry and installed art that engages the public in Climate Justice. Eco-Poetic Installation: Working with the long seagrass of the Seaview coast, I’ll work to craft my third large scale EcoPoetic Installation. I’ll create a poem during my time at Sou’wester and work with the seagrass to construct a line of the poem into a temporary installation, about 15 feet wide and 2 ft tall.