| wldwood river website | sheila's website | kathy's website |
black iris
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song / eurydyce
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loom
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dream / two swans
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velocity |
celluloid afterlife
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was it I (spoken word)
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was it I (words on screen) |
two worlds
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birdland / 2
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blue ladder
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anatomy (work sample)
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Thanks to Erika Mock, Phantom Galleries Superior, Don McTavish, Elyse Holte, Tim Kaiser, Nathan Keski, the Androy Hotel & The Main Club
The poetry videos and broadsides in the Phantom Gallery are from recent books.
The Mother Tongue poems are a woman's coming of age on Minnesota's Iron Range. Several of the poems are about my mother and the Finnish language and culture I grew up within, exploring the mother daughter bond and female sexuality.
Echo & Lightning uses the metaphor of bird migration and myth to examine ways that women change and even relinquish the self. It is a spiritual exploration of fear, ecstasy and love through poems about Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lot's Wife, the Greek myths of Eurydyce and Leda and the Swan, and the Gnostic book Thunder, Perfect Mind.
Cloud Birds is about immigrants, bears, wilderness, bird migration, and the journey of women through hardship and violence, including the story of Persephone going back home to mother. This book has poems about fear and my father, my Minnesota family history and twenty love poems to bears.
Migrations: Poetry & Prose for Life's Transitions, traces movement and change in the community. This book is an anthology of 75 writers from the Lake Superior and Northern Minnesota region that came out of an Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Arts Learning grant and my work as Duluth's Poet Laureate, teaching writing as a tool for life's transitions in the community and at Safe Haven Women's Shelter, the Family Justice Center and the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project.
In addition, these projects have become collaborations with my partner, composer and cellist Kathy McTavish. As the name Wildwood River implies, our arts collaborative is a confluence of the arts. We live and work closely in a creative process that draws from our own life histories and experience. The project continues in the form of musical compositions, abstract film, poetry videos, gallery installations, and live performances.
Whatever gets in the way of your work becomes your work. Or maybe my creative work is an answer to my mother, who often told me as a child that life was hard. My grandparents were Finnish immigrants in far northern Minnesota with no grasp of the English language when they came. They lived in poverty. My grandfather's alcoholism and domestic violence only made things worse for my grandmother and their ten children. It was strength and resilience of the women that carried them through.
Migration from the old country was only the beginning, and it taught me things about moving from one culture to another. After that were other kinds of migrations: from a difficult marriage to coming out as a lesbian, from working in a taconite mine to a career in social work, from an avid reader to becoming a writer. One of the central obsessions in my life is the question why women (and men, for that matter) deny their own needs, enter into or stay in dangerous situations, risk their children's safety or well being, deny or defy reality because of their dreams.
I was immediately drawn to this space between the Androy Hotel & the Main Club on Tower Avenue.
As a cellist and composer I usually work with sound & this installation challenged me to explore silence ... to work with the sounds of the street ... The art would be in a storefront separated by glass from the viewer ... a window reflecting the lights and colors of the outside world and a luminous presence of video, shadow & light inside.
The exhibit is stained by the sound of trucks rumbling down broken asphalt ... the lights and colors of the window-reflected street ... moving pictures ... collide from both inside & outside the room ... the phantom gallery ...
This exhibit comes allive night ... the darkness - a cloak - Tower Avenue calls to the light & shadow - the moving pictures are luminous after the day darkens.
I have always loved neon on city streets after dark ... I wanted to evoke that glow.
vacancy ... silence
lost or forsaken bicycles ...
the holy avenues
... this place broken & sky
lost & luminous
dusty glass
light & shadows
ladder & flight
Looking through the car window at the video tonight I was reminded of drive-in movies ...
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