Tag Archives: sitka center for art and ecology

Prosthetic Cosmologies gallery up

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the-invitation2This is the first panel in the image poem “Your Presence is Requested” from Prosthetic Cosmologies. My artist statement follows.

My work aims to make visible the shared processes – cultural, environmental, political, and economic – that define daily life in both the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. I believe that any person, any organism, any word, indeed, any object, connects us in transformative dependency and as yet unrecognized possibility. I proceed in the faith that respectful seeing reveals the structure of interconnection and new forms of hope. I compose images that testify to the poetic beauty of this complexity.

 

While at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, I added ten panels to an ongoing series of image-poems entitled Prosthetic Cosmologies, which chronicles the globalizing myths that situate Shenzhen across diverse levels of historical experience. The formal structure of each image-poem combines genre conventions from classical Chinese poetry, anthropological theories about the human quest for meaning, and photographic images from Shenzhen and elsewhere. I used my time at Sitka both to reflect on the mythmaking that emerges in delta cultures and to track those myths along the Oregon Coast.

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images from sitka

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path leading to Salmon River Estuary

As promised, images of Sitka and the surrounding environs. Myths take root here.

sustainable livelihood

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A week into my residency and Shenzhen and Sitka begin to speak to each other.

Yesterday, I walked along the banks of Salmon River. Kim provided snowpants and Jalene lent me a pair of boots, so I trudged happily through the muck, where the grass, barnacles, some kind of seaweed, and spiraling sands enabled a silence that I have previously only experienced in meditation. The natural beauty of Cascade Head gentles me, helping me to feel where I am.

Feeling space, as opposed to resisting space is new to me. In Shenzhen, I devote much of my time to documenting spaces that shock or outrage me. This means that I rarely allow myself to experience the agony of how the environment has been transformed in Shenzhen. Instead, I back away at critical moments and sink into abstractions about place and space. This abstracting is both defensive (Houhai truly depresses me) and part of a struggle to engage others in dialogue about what is happening in Shenzhen because I’m not sure how much others know about what is going on here (and here even in Sitka is Shenzhen…)

What strikes me in Sitka is how Shenzhen allows Sitka and other beautiful places to exist without questioning the conditions that make them possible–contamination out of sight/site, out of mind. Specifically, In Lincoln City, I haven’t seen any manufacturing. Most of the stuff around me was made in or near Shenzhen, including parts for the eMac that I’m using to type this entry (FoxConn is in Longhua, just past the Meilin Checkpoint.) Everyone at the center is involved in consumption, including consumption of this amazing environment. The rub of course is that this kind of consumption (in house with central heating and internet hook-up) is predicated on the existence of places like Shenzhen…

Together, Sitka and Shenzhen make visceral for me the question of sustainable livelihood. It is not just that we need to preserve places like Cascade Head, but also that we need to come up with ways of living that do not lead to the level of destruction that go into creating Shenzhen. The point, of course, is that these worlds co-evolve; FoxComm is where it is for real reasons, including poverty throughout neidi.

Sitka Center for Art and Ecology

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i am ready to leap, picture from first walk along estuary

i am presently at the sitka center for art and ecology for a month long artist residency. i have the pleasure of being here with Matthew Bower, Kim R Stafford, and Dawn Stetzel.

i am enjoying the feeling of being overwhelmed, both by the beauty of this environment and the gratitude i feel for this opportunity. my initial forays into this new and radically different environment have helped me to begin thinking holistically again. i am struck by how these sweeping landscapes open the mind to interconnections and windswept meetings. thinking about the deathly perfection of gold, i folded an ingot and photographed it along the coastline. paper boats, paper tigers, golden paper for the dead…


paper ingot

also, this is my first attempt at engaging shenzhen without academic scaffolding and presenting myself as an artist (with admittedly ethnographic inclinations). i am here to work on a series of image poems that interpret the transformation of shenzhen at the nexus of two discourses – the chinese discourse of the five elements and the western medical discourse of prosthetic construction. specifically, i am interested in mapping the cosmological implications of the transvaluation of chinese cartographies brought on by the ongoing construction of shenzhen. will post images.