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Erin Louise Gould : all that i have

June 29, 2022 by Jordan Eddy

Erin Louise Gould



all that I have

No Land
54½ E. San Francisco Street, #7
Santa Fe, New Mexico
March 21 - October 24, 2020


explore all that i have

If you know where to look, you can find the Kentucky coffee tree scattered in parking lots and traffic medians across the city of Albuquerque, where it has found a home as an ‘urban development tree.’ Over the past two years, Erin Louise Gould’s art practice has centered on this rare tree and its peculiar story. Living with a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and surviving a decade-long eating disorder, Gould has used her art practice to tackle issues relating to the body and its idiosyncrasies, desires, and seeming contradictions. In her newest body of work, Gould gradually unearths the story of the Kentucky coffee tree while interweaving her own.

All That I Have is an exhibition of printmaking, sculpture, video, writing, and found object installation that tells this intertwined story of life, loss, and multi-species resilience. It opens Saturday, March 21 and remains on view through October 24th.

The Kentucky coffee tree’s seedpods are enormous. When the seasons change and they shed their leaves, their giant, leathery seedpods remain, clinging to branches like they’d been left behind. “Originally, they would be shaken down by a wooly mammoth,” Gould says. “Now they just stay up there until they are knocked down by the wind.” Their halcyon days were millennia ago, when their evolutionary partners, wooly mammoths and other megafauna, roamed across North America and helped to disperse their seeds. Their seed coats are too thick for any present-day North American animal to chew and digest; their seedpods themselves filled with sweet—but highly toxic—pulp. The tree is often referred to as an evolutionary anachronism, or more severely, as “the dead tree.”

Today, they are planted for their ability to give shade and withstand the stressors of the urban environment, including many in Albuquerque, where Gould first discovered them. A current graduate student at the University of New Mexico, she visits many of the trees regularly to collect their fallen seeds and seedpods and build relationships, both of which she builds into her immersive installation at No Land. Incorporating atmospheric plays of light, shadow, and reflection, the installation gives off the sense of a ghostly tension between presence and absence.

While many Kentucky coffee trees still populate the country, they have spent the last ten thousand years producing the same cumbersome seedpods and impervious seed coats. Most of them simply never have the chance to germinate, thanks to its own genetic design—a biological challenge that Gould finds herself relating to when reflecting on her own autoimmune disease. “I find myself particularly drawn to my Kentucky coffee tree friends when I feel this way,” she writes in Seeds and Dead Things Alike , a booklet of writing and poetry accompanying the exhibition. “They, too, are overbuilt, overprotected to the point of self-harm.” Several short videos showing Gould with the trees will be on view, including “ I Long to be Arboreal,” a piece that draws bodily comparisons between the Kentucky coffee tree and Gould herself.

All That I Have also features works by Gould in relief printmaking and cast sculpture made from cardboard pulp. In other sculptures, she uses materials such as hair, metal mesh, and rawhide that seem to have been molded around objects that are no longer present. “I’m interested in casting and printmaking as a physical memory, an echo, of an object that is no longer here,” Gould says. The majority of the materials throughout the exhibition were given to or found by Gould, who considers all of these objects, whether they be human or plant made, collected in a parking lot or specifically given to her, to be gifts. By limiting the work to such materials, she is contemplating gratitude and the harms done under capitalism, colonialism, and human exceptionalism, in which beings are considered objects rather than subjects.

Despite their “dead tree” moniker, the Kentucky coffee tree is hardy and tough, drought resistant and pollution resistant. Gould has noticed some trees seeming to propagate in the median near the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, where she speculates that cars must be running over their seedpods and shooting the seeds back into the median—the only way that they could be shedding their seed coat. “Maybe the Kentucky coffee tree is living and evolving in a time scale that I cannot potentially comprehend,” she says. “Maybe they are waiting for a world that I cannot imagine.” Recently when traveling away from home, Gould remembers finding a small group of Kentucky coffee trees when she least expected to, and she broke down in tears. “Those particular trees didn’t know me, but still… When you build these kinds of intimate relationships with other species, there’s something kind of magical that happens—miraculous even.”


Erin Louise Gould is a multimedia artist working primarily with sculpture, video, and performance. She is currently attending the University of New Mexico to attain her MFA in sculpture and participated in the Land Arts of the American West program in 2018. Before moving to Albuquerque in 2017, she lived in Santa Fe for four years after finishing her Bachelors of Art degree at Colorado College in 2013. Living with a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and surviving a decade-long eating disorder fed Gould’s interest in how we perceive and live inside our bodies and how our bodies sometimes seem to live without us.

June 29, 2022 /Jordan Eddy
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Emmaly Wiederholt : Pick Me (Apart)

November 09, 2019 by Jordan Eddy

Performance

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
November 9 - 10, 2019

Events
Evening Performance: Saturday, November 9, 8pm
Matinee Performance: Sunday, November 10, 2pm
$10 - 20 Suggested Donation

Failure and disappointment, success and recognition—what do each of these circumstances feel like, and how do they change us? In “Pick Me (Apart),” Albuquerque-based choreographer, dancer, and writer Emmaly Wiederholt navigates the treacherous psychological terrain of success and failure in a 25-minute performance piece that draws on both her classical training as a dancer and her interest in experimental dance. “Pick Me (Apart)” comes to No Land for its Santa Fe debut on Saturday, November 9th at 8PM, followed by a matinee performance on Sunday, November 10th at 2pm.

In “Pick Me (Apart),” Wiederholt enacts the long-term and daily struggle to be her best self. “I was thinking about the phenomenon of when a person has a stated goal or ambition, but somewhere along the line an inner monster sabotages that goal,” Wiederholt says. “It could be something like quitting smoking, or weight loss, or even just the goal of, ‘I want to be better!’ It’s something most people can relate to on an individual and sometimes daily level.”

The piece is a new direction for Wiederholt by integrating a multimedia video component that acts in tandem with her performance. “I’ve been thinking about the gaze; somehow attention validates the worth of an artist,” Wiederholt says. “It’s not enough to do a creative act in your living room and let it sit in isolation – you’re supposed to put it in front of people. I’m playing with what it means to be seen.” Acting as the protagonist in the piece, Wiederholt finds herself confronted with failure and disappointment, in some ways of her own doing, in other ways as a result of forces beyond her control. Through this desperate failing state, she explores the mind traps that hide in success and in the approval of others.

Wiederholt finds this quagmire of self-perception and self-scrutinization relevant to larger ambitions in life, such as career or personal goals. “Pick Me (Apart)” borrows from her own complicated relationship with success as a dancer. Having grown up in Albuquerque, Wiederholt trained intensely as a ballet dancer through her 20s in San Francisco, a tightrope-walk dependent on having the right combination of training, exposure, and luck. Acknowledging her complicated desire to succeed in an environment rife with eating disorders, misogyny, racism, and ableism, Wiederholt muses, “Why the hell did I want that life so badly?”

Life eventually led her back to Albuquerque, where she maintains a practice in dance, choreography, writing, and poetry. She is the founder and editor of Stance on Dance, an international online publication that “expands conversations beyond studios and theaters to illuminate the breadth and impact of dance as a practice.” In 2016, Wiederholt published Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, a 200-page book involving the stories of more than 50 dancers from the ages of 50 to 95 and seeking to dispel the notion of success and accomplishment in the world of dance as being dependent on age. She is currently working on a new book looking at disability in dance. Wiederholt’s current practice as a dancer, writer, poet, and editor all signify a wider practice of questioning and chipping away at the perceived boundaries and conventions of contemporary dance.


Emmaly Wiederholt is a dance artist, writer, and editor. She received her MA in arts journalism from the University of Southern California and her BFA in ballet and BS in political science from the University of Utah. She further studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and performed extensively around the Bay Area, including with AXIS Dance Company, Little Seismic Dance Company, Alyce Finwall Dance Theater, and Christine Cali and Co. She is a founding member of the dance theater company Project Thrust, and toured its one-woman show Cover Girl, choreographed by Malinda LaVelle, in 2016 and 2017. Her own choreography has been presented in Albuquerque at Maple Street Dance Space and Aux Dog X-Space, and in Santa Fe through the Strangers Collective at Form & Concept, the Center for Contemporary Art, and the Santa Fe Community Gallery, as well as at the Railyard Performance Center through Fierce Feminine Risings. Emmaly has contributed to several publications in addition to founding and running her international online publication, Stance on Dance. Her first book, Beauty is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, came out in 2017 and is available on Amazon. She is currently working on a new book examining the ways disability is discussed in dance. She also leads the Saturday Albuquerque contact improvisation jam and Danceability improvisation classes for seniors, and is a proud founding member of the Albuquerque Dance Exchange.

November 09, 2019 /Jordan Eddy
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International Passport Paintings by Meester Wittenbols

September 27, 2019 by Jordan Eddy

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
September 27 - 29, 2019

Events
Passport Painting Session One: Friday, September 27, 4 to 8pm
Passport Painting Session Two: Sunday, September 29, 2 to 6pm

Would you like to have an international passport painting? Book an appointment to sit for Passport Painting Officer Meester Wittenbols. Sessions will take place on Friday, September 27th, from 4 to 8pm and Sunday, September 29th, from 2 to 6pm at No Land.

This project is part of the WASbiennale and Pilot Live Arts. In her first exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Doreen Wittenbols will also undertake her first performative painting project by working from the public.

The passport paintings will travel on to be exhibited at Atelier Néerlandais this coming October in Paris, for a showing curated by Saskia Vos. The passport paintings may travel onward to other exhibitions before they are returned to the participants.

To book an appointment: Please email passportpaintings@gmail.com.
Appointments will be scheduled in 15 minute intervals. The actual portrait will take 5 minutes or less.

Suggested $5 donation for each portrait and mailing of the passport to the sitter following upcoming exhibitions. Sitters and visitors are welcome to watch each painting session.


Doreen Wittenbols is a Dutch-Canadian visual artist educated in the figurative painting tradition. She was awarded the prestigious academic Governor-General’s medal upon graduating from the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto. Thereafter she completed her MFA at Concorida University in Montreal. After participating in two, Dutch, artist residencies, Wittenbols decided to relocate to The Netherlands and make Amsterdam home. Since 2018 she uprooted again, and is living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


International Passport Paintings is brought to No Land through Pilot Live Arts. Pilot is happenings dedicated to promoting and showcasing experimental and unseen art in the Santa Fe and surrounding Southwest communities, with a special emphasis on investigational and untried or tested work.


September 27, 2019 /Jordan Eddy
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Drew MC : Love Spell

May 25, 2019 by Jordan Eddy

Drew MC
LOVE SPELL

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 25, 6-9pm

May 25 - August 3, 2019

Drew MC’s Love Spell was sparked by a romance, but that’s just the prologue. The Santa Fe artist spent over a year exchanging intimate text messages and photographs with a faraway lover. When he vanished into the digital void, she was left with hundreds of images of herself. From this incomplete record of a distinctly modern relationship, MC illustrated, collaged and sculpted a mystical origin story for a new type of epic hero. Love Spell, opening Saturday, May 25 at No Land, unravels modern notions of faith, duty, destiny and identity.
“I didn’t want this to be the ending,” admits MC. “People keep telling me that I learned about myself, but I had to find something more vital and complicated than that.” She’s still a bit lost in the twilight of her mostly virtual love affair, which ended last winter. Her lover was a foreign soldier from an elite fighting force, so they had intermittent contact after their initial encounter.
“Part of the intense pull was this warrior identity he had. I got a taste of that, and it started to radically change my work,” MC says. She was already a few years deep in a dedicated art practice, which had intertwined with her spiritual practice. “I had developed this sense of duty, of obedience to something that was speaking through me,” she explains. “I used to call it channeling.” Her aesthetic was deeply symbolic, inspired by the allegories of the Pre-Raphaelites, the bold illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, and the esoteric universe of the Rider-Waite tarot deck. Her early works were mostly ink drawings, usually in monochromatic hues with accents of gold and silver.
MC’s romantic experience seeped into her palette and spiked her illustrations with psychedelic hues. Her lines multiplied, forming complex compositions inspired by the sensual photographs she was creating. A new array of symbols brought her work into conceptual alignment with the confessional art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracy Emin. MC felt as though she had embarked on her own military mission or religious crusade. “You can try to conquer me if you like,” wrote her lover in one message.
The relationship ended, as so many modern-day trysts do, on the virtual plane. His side of a long email exchange abruptly halted and the spell was ostensibly broken, though the drawings continued to spill out. “I felt like I was writing a book on my own life, and I just wanted to get to some sort of fucking conclusion,” MC says.
As the weeks and months wore on, she began to reframe the story she was telling. The body of work had started as a visual chronicle of a passionate romance, but it was morphing into something else. There are no depictions of MC’s lover in the final array of artworks that make up Love Spell. Most of the drawings and collages are inspired by the artist’s own form, though they aren’t exactly self-portraits. MC started to conceive of the woman in the images as a fully formed being that had split off from her, continuing her epic quest in a new direction.
“The only thing you control is your internal world and your spirit. If you really want to live a hero’s journey, it has to begin in an internal place,” MC says. “You have to be willing to love your story, and fall in love with that vision of yourself as a character in a grand narrative. You have to yield to it, and you don’t get to choose what it’s going to be.”
Love Spell consists of drawings, collages, marked-up photographs and sculptures. They appear with ephemera and correspondence from different points in MC’s creative process, but the show is not a trail of clues leading to a romantic reunion. From the rubble of love’s battlefield, MC’s facsimile rose to roam farther afield—solitary and imperfect, but exuberant, sensual, and dangerous. “This experience woke up something in me. It made me want to explore the warrior experience, which was incredibly painful at times,” says MC. “I hope other people draw courage to fight their own battles from this work. That would make it worth it.”

Biography

Drew MC is an identity that arose out of the ashes of a breakdown. She arrived as the image of a woman pierced by her own sword, an image and a theme that continues to resonate throughout my work and my life. I paint and draw with ink almost exclusively, and the feeling of ink gliding across and into paper evokes a deep sense of peace and satisfaction in my soul. The bedrock of my artistic practice, the reason I create, is to do the work that God asks of me. My artistic practice and my spiritual practice are two strands of the same DNA, and my hope is that all who are drawn to my images find within them the message they have been waiting for.


May 25, 2019 /Jordan Eddy
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Emily Margarit Mason : Shadows Through a Petal

October 27, 2018 by Jordan Eddy

Emily Margarit Mason
Shadows Through a Petal

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7

October 27, 2018 - January 13, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 27, 6-9pm
Theodore Cale Schafer Performance: Saturday, November 17, 7:30pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, January 12, 2019, 6-9 pm

For Emily Margarit Mason, the deserts and mountains of New Mexico have a lot in common with the beaches of Florida where she grew up. Her art, in turn, pays homage to both mountain and sky, desert and ocean—the past echoing within the present. Her first solo exhibition in Santa Fe, Shadows Through a Petal, features meditations on place and memory that incorporate digital photography with an overtly physical art-making process. The exhibition goes on view at Strangers Collective’s No Land art space on October 27 and runs through January 13, 2019.

While her interest in photography first began with her parents' old film camera, a Canon AE-1 35 mm, she made the switch to digital halfway through her undergraduate study at MICA. But this presented a challenge for her: “It isn’t enough for me to just press a button and make a picture,” she says. “I had to find a way to use my hands.”

Mason’s practice begins by collecting raw materials she finds on treks in the surrounding landscapes of New Mexico and Colorado. She then layers these gathered materials and her own printed photographs in outdoor, set-like arrangements, which are photographed again to create her final image. By fragmenting her images both digitally and sculpturally, Mason draws our attention to the way that photography can become a stand-in for memory and, in turn, for experience itself. But, as Mason asks, “What happens between experience and memory—is memory real to the experience? What does it look like?”

This series began after Mason first spent time in New Mexico while working for a summer at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops four years ago. When she returned to Baltimore, she remained inspired by the visuals and the sensations of the desert, leading to the beginning of the body of work that she has continued to develop through the present day—as of 2017, Mason is now a full-time resident of Santa Fe. Shadows Through a Petal is the culmination of her experimentation with digital photography and alternative processes, the creation of what she calls “momentary sculptures for the camera.”

“The way Emily incorporates natural forces into her work is fundamental to her process, even though, in many ways, they are out of her control,” Strangers co-director Jordan Eddy says. “Watching her continue to develop this series has been incredibly exciting for us.” Though she has a studio now, Mason still stages her sets outside, so they are susceptible to the ever- changing effects of wind, light, and shadow. “The light out here is insane,” she says. “You have to use it.”

Biography

Emily Margarit Mason is an artist living and working in New Mexico. She received her B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art. Mason’s work denies realism by accumulating and compressing perspectives, ultimately confusing the assumed monocular lens the camera typically provides. Her work has been shown in Baltimore, New York City, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Santa Fe. She is inspired daily by the light, landscape and magic that surrounds her.

October 27, 2018 /Jordan Eddy
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Niomi Fawn : Wild Home

August 04, 2018 by Jordan Eddy

Niomi Fawn
WILD HOME

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7

August 4 - September 29, 2018

Opening Reception: Saturday, 8/4, 6-9 pm
Performance by Jessie Deluxe: Saturday, 9/1, 7 pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, 9/26, 6:30 pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, 9/29, 6-9 pm

In Niomi Fawn’s professional life, anywhere and everywhere could be an art venue. They’re the owner of Curate Santa Fe, a company that injects challenging artwork into quotidian spaces across town. In a new solo exhibition at Strangers Collective’s NO LAND art space, Fawn shifts focus from the public sphere to the most intimate context. Wild Home, a rare display of the curator and artist’s own work, explores genderqueer identity, domesticity, and a return to a primordial, non-binary state of knowing and being. “It’s a jungle in there,” they say. The exhibition debuts at NO LAND on Saturday, August 4 from 6 to 9 pm. Fawn will host an event series over the course of the show, with an evening of performances by Jessie Deluxe and Niomi Fawn on September 1, 7 pm, and an artist talk on Wednesday, September 26 at 6:30 pm. Fawn will appear at a closing reception on September 29, 6 to 9 pm.

“Niomi is a force on Santa Fe’s art scene. They’re truly ubiquitous,” says NO LAND co-director Jordan Eddy. Fawn spearheads the curatorial programs of Iconik Coffee Roasters and ART.i.factory Gallery, and has organized major exhibitions in spots like Santa Fe Community College and Freeform Art Space. They’ve even unleashed a show on the streets of Santa Fe consisting of sculptural bike hitches by local artists. “When the idea for this solo show came up, our whole dynamic shifted into these private moments,” Eddy says. “We mostly planned the show on Niomi’s front porch—in this zone between home and nature—which really connects with how they’re going to transform NO LAND.”

Wild Home is an art exhibition and an immersive installation, drawing the viewer into a fantastical setting that intertwines a domestic space with a lush forest. “I’m thinking about the time before time,” says Fawn. “It’s this question of, what was it like to be human and be connected before there was all this language that tried to homogenize us? What was it like to be in congress with nature?” Elements of the show include paper and wood sculptures dyed with a Japanese technique called suminagashi, aluminum plates bearing digitally distilled images of nature that Fawn calls “neo-pastiche" prints, and a large-scale, mixed-media sculpture that’s both furnishing and altar.

“I want to make objects that feel like artifacts of a time gone by, or maybe like old bones that you’d find in the forest,” says Fawn. “When you see something like that, you want to preserve and protect it, to bring it home.” The artist sees a strong connection between nature and the domestic space: both are sanctuaries that allow us to shed rigid societal labels and embrace more complex conceptions of our identities. “For a lot of people, especially genderqueer people, you go out in the world and you’re trapped in this filter and it’s exhausting,” Fawn says. “I get home and I get to be myself. I can kiss the person I love on the cheek and I’m not afraid that someone’s going to harm me. If you’re out in nature, it’s the same way. No bear’s going to say, ‘I don’t think so!’” Fawn hopes to inspire viewers to celebrate the unique and intimate relationship that humans and nature possess, and remember that it reflects our true rhythms.

Biography

Niomi Fawn is a queer artist currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They grew up in California and Hawaii. The art of Niomi Fawn developed from a technique dubbed neo-pastiche, which brought digital tools and visions to traditional collage in an effort to recontextualize familiar images and, through creative juxtaposition, to create new statements from old concepts. Neo-pastiche is primarily a two-dimensional technique and, while it remains a vital component of Niomi Fawn's art, they have been applying the theories of the technique on a wider scale - moving into a third dimension and blurring the boundaries that too often separate art and audience. Their latest works involve the creation of objects, informed but not limited by neo-pastiche, which are placed in natural and constructed environments, gradually transforming the surroundings and fuzzing the lines between the artistic and non-artistic worlds. Niomi Fawn was part of the Meow Wolf art collective from 2010 through 2014. They have since left to form Curate Santa Fe. They also work with Victory Grrrls.

website.

August 04, 2018 /Jordan Eddy
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Flying Wall Studios : The Mechanics of Play

May 12, 2018 by Jordan Eddy

Flying Wall Studios
The Mechanics of Play

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7

May 12 - June 30, 2018

Puppet Demonstration: Sunday, 6/17, 2-4 pm, free
Closing Performance: Saturday, 6/30, 6-9 pm, free

No Land is open Saturdays, 12-4 pm.
Damon & Sabrina Griffith will also hold
special hours each Thursday, 6-9 pm
through the run of the show.

"This used to be the pit cover for the Lensic, and these are set pieces from a Wise Fool production,” says Damon Griffith, gesturing to the floor and walls of his garage. This colorful bricolage houses the wood and metalworking shop for Flying Wall Studios, a puppet production company that Damon co-directs with his wife Sabrina Griffith. Inside their house, the rest of the studio is a jury-rigged resume for their extensive performing arts background. From their fantastical headquarters, the Griffiths turn out intricately detailed puppets that blur the lines between toy and sculpture. Their new exhibition at Strangers Collective’s No Land art space, The Mechanics of Play, features an exquisite body of work that lands firmly in the latter category. Still, they’ll never abandon their playful roots: the show, which opens Saturday, May 12 from 6 to 9 pm, will feature puppet demonstrations (on Sunday, June 17 and Saturday, June 30) that encourage visitors to interact with the artworks. “If you don’t play with a puppet, it dies,” says Sabrina.

“For a long time, this wasn’t our art, they were just puppets we made for money,” Damon says. “But as we did more and more, the line got blurrier and blurrier.” Sabrina adds, “The Mechanics of Play is full of extremely ambitious stuff that’s been hiding in our workshop.” That includes puppet vignettes with elaborate sets and props based on themes like “noir” and “burlesque,” and monumental works such as The Procession, eight linked puppets on wheels. The Griffiths have a packed schedule outside of their work with Flying Wall Studios. By day, they’re professional art preparators who install exhibitions for Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, SITE Santa Fe and Center for Contemporary Arts. By night, they are musicians in the Santa Fe band Cloacas. They’re also working with Santa Fe filmmaker Devon Hawkes Ludlow on The Love That Would Not Die, a multipart zombie puppet musical that’s building buzz locally and nationally. None of this has drained their passion for puppet making at nearly every spare moment, an obsessive and highly collaborative practice the couple has maintained for 18 years. It’s helped them make ends meet during lean times, and now it’s the basis for a budding reputation in the fine arts.

The Flying Wall Studios workshop holds relics from every chapter of this history. The Griffiths fell in love at a puppet festival in Pittsburg in 2000. “The first time I saw Damon, he was leading a puppet parade down a dark brick street,” says Sabrina. “I moved in that night, basically.” Both had extensive backgrounds in theater and puppeteering, so they swiftly cofounded a company under the macabre moniker Puppet Meat Market. Four years later, they bought a camper and started converting it into a rolling puppet studio. “We extended the top and tricked it out, so this thing was just like a giant, traveling block,” says Damon. “That’s why our friend called it the Flying Wall.” On their honeymoon in winter 2004, they hightailed it out of Pennsylvania with their sights set on Oakland, California, but ended up in Santa Fe by accident. “In every possible way, Santa Fe pulled the ‘Land of Entrapment’ on us,” Sabrina says. “We came here to visit friends. Then we got hit by a snowstorm, and the Flying Wall got hit by a truck on Rufina, and we ran out of money. So we stuck around.”

In the Griffiths’ studio, there’s shelving and furniture salvaged from the Flying Wall vehicle, along with a cabinet of beads, buttons and bits called “The Tower of Bobble” that they’ve had since the beginning. A vast archive of puppets they’ve created peeks out from every nook and cranny. More recent artifacts include heaps of textiles and other raw materials for puppet-making donated by local craftspeople and performing arts professionals.

“Sabrina and Damon’s process is totally gritty and improvisational, making it all the more astonishing to meet these elegant, fleshed-out characters they bring to life,” says Kyle Farrell, co-director of No Land. “During the show’s demonstrations and performances, visitors will have a chance to examine and play with the mechanisms that make the puppets move with such personality.” In addition to a performance featuring local puppeteers at the opening reception, No Land will soon announce a series of performances that will take place over the course of the exhibition. “We’re bringing in all sorts of special guests for the programming,” says Damon. “If you visit the show at any point during its run, we want to make sure that you touch the art.”

 

 

 

 

May 12, 2018 /Jordan Eddy
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Sarah Darlene Palmeri : The Magazine Project

April 05, 2018 by Jordan Eddy

Presented by Strangers Collective

UNM-Taos
Atrium Gallery
1157 County Rd. 110
Ranchos de Taos, NM 87557

April 5 - May 4, 2018

Opening: Thursday, April 5, 5-7 pm

Imagine an artist perched atop a newsstand, scribbling across magazine covers with vivid pastels. Sarah Palmeri’s installation piece The Magazine Project instantly conjures that radical visual, with reproductions of marked-up magazine pages arranged in staggering grids. The Denver artist is determined to seize the imagery typically wielded by mass media and flip the script. She sends advertising vernacular on a collision course with abstraction in this immersive exploration of contemporary feminine identity. Palmeri collaborates with Santa Fe curatorial project Strangers Collective to present The Magazine Project at UNM-Taos, the second stop on a national tour for the installation. The exhibition opens in the UNM-Taos Atrium Gallery on Thursday, April 5 from 5-7 pm.

From Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman, artists have adopted and subverted mass media aesthetics for generations. Now, creators who grew up in the bright glare of the Digital Age are taking a crack at it—and they’re perfectly suited to the challenge. “Contemporary art is so much about social practice and engaging a community, and that is what mass media has done for ages,” says Palmeri. “Advertising has this incredible accessibility going for it, but I think art can use the same tools to expose entrenched cultural frameworks.”

Palmeri is a trained painter who got the idea for The Magazine Project when she started an experimental series of pastel drawings on magazine pages. “I was working with this idea of reclaiming your identity, in the way that graffiti artists tag space to take it back,” Palmeri says. “I wasn’t vandalizing these images of people, I was shielding or armoring them.” She used the drawings as studies for a larger series of abstract, mixed-media paintings on canvas, but puzzled over what to do with the original images. By making high quality reproductions of the works and arranging them in grids, she directed tsunamis of serial imagery for a powerful new purpose.

“The intent of mass media is this manipulative gender stereotyping,” says Palmeri. “To be the best man or woman, you should have this and look like this. The difference of intention in this project is that it’s challenging you to be self-reflective, to understand yourself and your relationship to other people.” The project sent Palmeri on a soul search about her own notions of gender, and the longer she looked, the more intricate her understanding became. Through the language of abstraction, she found a vibrant spectrum of gender that was in stark contrast to the broad strokes she’d been taught. “I grew up in a little town an hour outside of Baton Rouge, where we had a Piggly Wiggly and a stoplight,” she says. “I realized at a certain point how I’ve been put in this straitjacket: ‘You’re a girl, you’re so fragile, let other people take care of that.’ No, I’m capable of doing all of those things despite what you think women can or should do.”

Palmeri hopes to inspire similar meditations from her audience: in addition to the installation, she’ll set up a table in the space with art supplies and magazines for visitors to make their own works. Participants can submit their art at themagazineproject.com for potential inclusion in a future edition of Reassembled, the show’s companion magazine. The publication examines the role arts and advertising play in creating social change. Palmeri unveiled the first issue at the inaugural showing of The Magazine Project, in Denver’s Understudy art space in February 2018. She plans to tour The Magazine Project to five cities across the nation (Santa Fe and New Orleans shows are in the works), with additional issues of Reassembled emerging as the archive grows.

Palmeri teamed up with Strangers Collective to produce the UNM-Taos version of The Magazine Project. She’s been a member of the Santa Fe-based emerging arts group since 2015, when she was living in Santa Fe, and has exhibited in a number of their group exhibitions. Three of her paintings appear in their current exhibition Mirror Box at form & concept gallery in the Santa Fe Railyard. This is Palmeri’s first solo show with the collective, and also represents the group’s Taos debut. “Sarah’s project is conceptually sound enough to maintain these powerful contradictions, which is really exciting,” says Jordan Eddy, co-director of Strangers Collective. “It’s figurative and abstract, painterly and photographic, one artist’s broadcast and a grassroots collaboration with hundreds of people.”

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Bio

Sarah Palmeri graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts from Louisiana State University in 2011, where she studied mass communication and studio art. She has worked with Think 360 Arts for Learning since early 2016, an arts education nonprofit that integrates the arts in schools and community centers around Colorado. Her work has been exhibited in Ann Arbor, Baton Rouge, Denver, Key West, Los Angeles, Taos, Santa Fe, and San Francisco, and she has been a member of Strangers Collective of Santa Fe, NM since 2015. Sarah is currently is living and working in Denver, Colorado.

website.

 

 

 

April 05, 2018 /Jordan Eddy
Nate Masse, On Polyamory (detail), mixed media, 57.5 x 55″, 2013 - 2018.

Nate Masse, On Polyamory (detail), mixed media, 57.5 x 55″, 2013 - 2018.

Strangers : Mirror Box

February 23, 2018 by Jordan Eddy

A group exhibition by Strangers Collective
at form & concept
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form & concept
435 S. Guadalupe St.
February 23 – April 14, 2018

Events
Opening Reception: Friday, 2/23, 5-8 pm | RSVP on Facebook
Curator & Artist Talk: Saturday, 3/17, 2-3 pm | RSVP on Facebook
Zine Reading: Saturday, 4/7, 3-4 pm | RSVP on Facebook
Closing Performance by Emmaly Wiederholt: Saturday, 4/14, 7 pm | RSVP on Facebook
$5-$25 suggested donation for closing performance.

Kyle Farrell, Alex Gill and Jordan Eddy, co-directors of Strangers Collective and the No Land art space, curate this exhibition of emerging artists and writers at form & concept. Mirror Box represents a network of early career creatives, starting in Santa Fe and spiraling across the nation. Its curatorial throughline presents a radical method for reflecting on place and identity through art objects.

The term “mirror box” originates in the medical field: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran invented the box with two back-to-back mirrors in the center to help amputees manage phantom limb pain. The patient places the “good” limb into one side, and the “residual” limb into the other, making mirrored movements that can trick the brain into believing that it’s moving the phantom limb. “It’s a tribute to the incredible power of grey matter,” says Eddy. “If our minds are capable of conjuring a nervous system from thin air, can we link up with people, places or things in the same visceral but invisible way?” The curatorial team realized that art, like the mirror box, can act as a conduit for this type of transcendent—but also highly tangible—experience.

“As we turned over the idea of a ‘mirror box’ in conversation, its meaning evolved to represent a sort of theoretical art object,” says Farrell. “If you imagine a cube made from mirrors floating in a landscape, it reflects you and your surroundings across six different planes. By peering into it, you begin view identity and place in novel ways.” The show’s participants interact with the world in a similar fashion, reflecting, filtering and distorting their varied contexts to create visions of the world that are requisitely imbued with their own experiences.

Photographer Emily Mason makes images of her surroundings, collages them onto sculptural props, and photographs the finished assemblages to create images that flicker between dimensionality and abstraction. Painter Nate Masse creates layered figurative compositions that compress visual details from multiple moments into a single, sensuous image. Sculptor Julie Slattery shapes talismanic objects—in this case, enormous bird skulls—that become emotional reliquaries for specific events in her life.

“The artworks and zines are mapping out this ‘complete picture’ of an experience,” says Gill. “We’re asserting that fully realized artistic expression can communicate something truer than, say, a hasty smartphone snapshot of a particular person or place.” In an increasingly polarized world, it’s a radical act of empathy to dive through the looking glass.

Click here for a preview of Mirror Box on the form & concept blog.

RSVP ON FACEBOOK

 

Art by Kevin Bond, Emily Mason & Derek Chan.

Art

Kevin Bond, Derek Chan, Kyle Farrell, Alex Gill, Erin Gould, Julia Haywood, Chaz John, Kat Kinnick, Shannon Latham, Ariana Lombardi, Emily Mason, Nate Massé, Drew MC, David O’Brien, Josh Palmeri, Sarah Palmeri, Alicia Piller, Julie Slattery, Dion Valdez, Emmaly Wiederholt, Ona Yopack

Zines

Liz Brindley, Caryn Crimmel, Jordan Eddy, Pascal Emmer, Jess Haring, Katie Johnson, Israel Francisco Haros Lopez, Amanda Malloy & David McCarty, Erin Mickelson, Erica Nguyen, Yvette Serrano & Ryan Dennison, Bucket Siler, Emmaly Wiederholt, Rachelle Woods, Michael Wilson

form & concept

form & concept is an art gallery founded to expand and explore the boundaries of perceived distinctions between art, craft, and design. We believe that these realms are interdependent and form the nexus of creativity in today’s world. Our programming acts as a conversation between these disciplines, supporting contemporary creative practice through exhibitions of regional and international artists. form & concept serves the community through its educational programming by producing artist residencies, workshops, lectures, and other outreach programs.

website.

February 23, 2018 /Jordan Eddy
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Liz Brindley : Garlic

January 13, 2018 by Jordan Eddy

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
January 13-March 10, 2018

Events
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 6-9 pm
Printmaking Workshop: Saturday, January 27, 1-3 pm
Paper Making Workshop: Thursday, February 8, 7-9 pm
Morning Coffee: Monday, February 19th, 9-11 am
Closing Reception & Recipe Swap: Saturday, March 10th, 6-9 pm

“At the end of the day, I just want to be covered in ink and soil,” Liz Brindley says. This may not be too difficult a feat when you take into account how many hats she wears on a weekly basis: farmer, artist, writer, art educator, printmaker, community organizer. No Land’s next exhibition is Garlic, an artist residency that incorporates all facets of Brindley’s practice as a creator, educator, and cultivator.  Opening with an artist reception on Saturday, January 13th from 6-9 pm, Garlic features Brindley’s drawings, prints, a wall-sized mural, and installations of garlic skins, soil, and a kitchen-like space. Through Garlic’s two-month run time, Brindley will host workshops and other events at No Land centered on both art-making and food, hoping to provide spaces for honest dialogue about local agriculture, food justice and creativity.

You should hear Liz Brindley talk about garlic. “It’s so underappreciated,” she says. “It’s in just about everything we eat, and yet it’s so precious.” As garlic is planted in autumn, it grows underground through the winter until harvest in early summer. Of all that is harvested, half of the crop gets replanted when fall comes again. To Brindley, this precious practice of cultivating garlic is the perfect metaphor for the naturally occurring cycles within people that we tend to ignore. “You know, humans are supposed to follow the cycles of the seasons, too,” Brindley points out. “The land slows down and rests in the winter, and maybe this is also a time for us to slow down and reflect.” 

This past fall, right around the time that garlic-planting season was beginning, she discovered The Garlic Testament by local farmer and author Stanley Crawford. She credits this book for awakening a new fascination with the vegetable. As a tribute to it, Brindley and No Land will put out an open call for more used garlic skins, which will be integrated into an installation within the gallery, and later in a paper-making workshop on Thursday, February 8th that will incorporate the skins into the fiber of the paper. 

Born in Oklahoma City, Brindley went to school at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she studied photography and printmaking and majored in Studio Art and Art History. After graduating in 2015, she undertook a nine-month artist residency through the school that saw her exploring her connection with land and food through installation and performance.  In 2016, after finishing school, Brindley landed in Santa Fe after travelling down the West Coast. She quickly became involved with Santa Fe’s agricultural community, working at various farms and as a farmer’s assistant at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. Last year after the presidential election, Brindley started the Creative Activists Network, seeking to foster connections between creatives in order to promote equality, justice and positive social change through collaboration. “It feels good to put roots down,” she says; “to build something that I hope will connect people to the land through creative practice, and to each other through dialogue about food and art. I still have a lot to learn here.”

Central to Brindley’s practice is her background in education. Her recently developed printmaking workshops – which she’s developed this spring and turned into her own business, Prints & Plants – involve the printing of cross-sections of produce found at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. Brindley will direct a similar workshop at No Land on Saturday, January 27th. 

Brindley ultimately hopes to bring this kind of art-making to people outside of the local agricultural community, and art community for that matter.  Her collaborative spirit is vital to her notion of how artists, and everyday people, can change the world. “How do we reacquaint ourselves with and learn to see the value in things that are here every day,” she wonders, “before we can’t take them for granted anymore?” 

Workshops

Relief Printmaking

$30 | 2 hours

Learn the process of relief printmaking in this hands-on workshop where you will learn to carve your own veggie-inspired stamp and create a series of prints to take home.

Papermaking

$30 | 2 hours

Learn how to make paper using recycled materials and garlic skins! The paper we create will be used as recipe cards to take home and give away at the "Garlic" Closing Reception.

Register Here

Artist Statement

“One of the singular characteristics of garlic is that it makes you wait.” 

- Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament

Garlic. The foundation of any nourishing meal. The ubiquitous nature of this produce shadows the time and energy required for its growth. One clove planted in the fall hibernates beneath frozen ground for seven to nine months to create a head of ten, maybe fifteen, cloves. Compare this to a single tomato seed that takes approximately three months to produce fruit that, when cut open, can provide hundreds of seeds. Garlic takes its time. It makes us wait. It teaches us patience and serves as a mirror for how to move inward in our own lives, shed old layers, and grow ourselves.

Garlic shares the quiet beauty of this essential veggie through the spaciousness that comes with waiting to create moments of peaceful reflection and faith. Can we dive deep to ask ourselves who we truly are and who we are becoming? Can we rest into the discomfort of unknowns until they become comfortable? Can we slow down to trust that, after all of the silence, harvest will come and with it, answers?

Bio

Liz Brindley is a Santa Fe printmaker and illustrator who makes artwork about food to increase awareness of the interconnection of humans and the land. Liz owns and operates Prints & Plants, a mobile art and ecology workshop that travels around New Mexico to teach about local agriculture through printmaking and drawing activities. 

Liz received her BA in Studio Art and Art History at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in 2015. She went on to participate in an Emerging Artist Residency at St. Olaf where she focused on ecologically-centered participatory and performance art. She moved to Santa Fe in 2016 after dreaming of living here since she was a kid. In Santa Fe, her artwork has been shown at Warehouse 21, Show Pony, and numerous pop-up markets.

website.

January 13, 2018 /Jordan Eddy
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Nathan Smerage: The No Land Sessions

December 21, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in event, no land, collaboration

Album Release Show

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7

Thursday, December 21, 7 pm
$5-$10 suggested donation.


When Santa Fe guitarist Nathan Smerage left his rock band Venus and the Lion late last year, he went on the hunt for a radically different project. He spent the better part of 2017 composing acoustic guitar ballads, and emerged with nine songs inspired by classic ragtime music. “It was on my bucket list that I wanted to make a solo guitar record,” Smerage says. “Just guitar, no other instruments, no overdubbing. It was terrifying.” This summer, Smerage recruited local musician Luke Carr to help him record the album over two days at No Land art space. For the official launch of the album, titled The No Land Sessions, Smerage returns to the gallery to replicate the raw energy and unique acoustics of the recording. The album release show is at No Land on Thursday, December 21 at 7 pm. The gallery will ask for a $5-$10 donation, and The No Land Sessions CDs will be available for $10. 

“What can you do with just a guitar?” says Smerage. “That’s the question that kicked off the project, a little over a year ago.” He’d recently graduated from the Contemporary Music Performance Program at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where he formed Venus and the Lion with three other students. As Smerage began composing songs for the solo album, he worked with former SFUAD professor and sound engineer Jason Goodyear to produce demos. “I was living across the street from Jason. Every month I would write a song, go to his place and record it. He was my coach,” Smerage says.

Smerage visited No Land for the first time early last summer, and re-imagined the art space as a makeshift recording studio. “I remember Nate walking through the gallery and snapping his fingers to check the acoustics,” says No Land Co-Director Jordan Eddy. “He was hearing something that we couldn’t, which was fascinating.” Smerage describes the space’s resonance as “wooden” and “old-timey”—a perfect complement to the ragtime-inflected soundscape of his compositions.  

Smerage and Carr sprung into action in July, recording about ten takes of each song in two eight-hour sessions. “It’s the first time I’ve ever done something like that,” says Smerage. “Usually any record I’ve worked on, we’d spend months to years finessing it. With this one, Luke was like, ‘Put down what you need to, and that’s it.’” The result is a 30-minute album that Smerage calls a perfect wind down after a long workday. It’s a world away from the electric grooves of Venus and the Lion, and part of a larger musical evolution for Smerage. “I’m challenging myself to become a master of my own instrument,” he says. “I want to really put my voice into it.” 

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Bio

Nathan Smerage grew up in Chicago, and studied music at Santa Fe University of Art and Design from 2012 to 2016. Since graduating, he has toured the nation as a solo act and with Santa Fe band Storming The Beaches With Logos In Hand. He is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

website.

December 21, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
nathan smerage, performance, music
event, no land, collaboration
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Ariana Lombardi  |  I Know That I Am

November 04, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in no land, residency

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
November 4- December 3, 2017

Opening Reception & Performance: Saturday, November 4, 6-9 pm
performances at 7 & 8 pm

Writing Workshop: Thursday, November 9, 6-9 pm
Reading: Saturday, November 11, 7 pm

From Minos to the modern day, every good labyrinth has held two types of challenges: those of the physical world, and those of the mind and soul. Ariana Lombardi’s installation at Strangers Collective’s No Land art space is no different. For the gallery’s first-ever artist residency, the writer, performer and visual artist will build an immersive display of art objects that links to a winding path of words she spun over several years of international travels. I Know That I Am opens on Saturday, November 4 from 6-9 pm, with a performance of the poetry that is the basis for the show’s visual components by Lombardi at 7 pm and 8pm. She will occupy the space from November 4-11, with a writing workshop on November 9 from 6-9 pm and a reading from her forthcoming travel memoir on November 11 at 7 pm. I Know That I Am will be on view through December 3, 2017. 

“It strikes me that people think writers just sit and write, because language is everything,” says Lombardi. “If I’m out in the world, I’m writing. You’re not just writing when you’re sitting there typing.” This notion has guided Lombardi, who graduated from Santa Fe University of Art and Design in 2012, to develop a thoroughly mobile writing practice over the past several years. The pursuit has taken her across the United States, through Turkey and Europe, to Guangzhou, China where she has lived since 2015. Along the way, Lombardi has collected words and drawings in her notebooks and objects in her pockets. These elements converge in I Know That I Am, which will feature found object collections, visual art, installation art, poetry and non-fiction writing.

“Whatever medium I’m working with, the intent is the same. Each piece is a moment that captures a movement of the soul, of the self,” Lombardi says. “Here I am in this moment, and that moves me to the next one.” Lombardi has methodically collected meaningful objects since her childhood in New Jersey, when her mother gave her a special box to safeguard small treasures. When she enrolled at College of Santa Fe in 2008 to study writing, her conception of collecting expanded to encompass words and experiences. The school briefly closed and then reopened at the end of her freshman year, leaving Lombardi and a small group of classmates to rebuild the community. They held salons to share their work, mounted interactive art and writing projects, and collaborated on a digital publication for emerging creatives called KNACK Magazine. 

In Lombardi’s junior year, she studied abroad in Turkey. After graduating she traveled across Europe with her sister Liv Lombardi, a musician who was in the midst of writing an album. These adventures were so fruitful for her writing and language practice that she ventured even farther, moving to China to teach English. Guangzhou became her home base for work and travels in Asia. “When I came to China, I started a new salon series and it blew up,” she says. She found herself at the forefront of yet another community of emerging artists and writers. “That’s the beautiful thing about China, you say you are and so you are,” Lombardi explains. This radical self-invention helped inspire the title of her residency at No Land.  

Lombardi has big plans for her next artistic endeavor. She’s gearing up to move to Taipei where she will study Mandarin, launch a new iteration of The Salon, and put the finishing touches on her book. She aims to bridge far-flung creative communities through her projects, Home Is A Lonely Hunter and The Salon. At the moment, she’s busy consolidating her creative output since college for I Know That I Am. On the exhibition’s opening night, she will read a cycle of poems, or language meditations, titled Instructions. These works directly relate to the art objects and artistic journey on view. At the end of her week of engaging with the public, she’ll read from her recently completed manuscript, This Body of Water. 

“I Know That I Am is a culmination of a universe of creative output,” says No Land co-director Kyle Farrell. “Visitors will discover common themes that carry them from one body of work to the next, but the experience is as intuitive as it is intellectual. Ari will inspire you to surrender to the moment, and get back in touch with your senses and emotions in visceral ways.”

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Workshop Details

Thursday, November 9, 6-9 pm
$10-$15 suggested donation

Lombardi will present a creative communication writing workshop called, "Hear It Is".  She'll invite participants to work with the sonics of language in experimental ways in order to write a poem which reflects one's innate sense of sound. How do you create meaning from sound? The event challenges participants to investigate and experiment with the narratives we construct, emotionally and definitively, when we are stripped of the facility to understand the meaning of the words being spoken to us. Attendees will be led by Lombardi in a discussion about issues and considerations of translation. You'll walk away from this workshop with a more attuned sense of the texture that sound makes and how to approach writing in unique and creative ways. 

Bio

Ariana Lombardi is a writer, artist and educator. She is a founder and the host of The Salon. She has hosted salons in Guangzhou, China and the States, as well as Salon-powered creative communication workshops. She is Co-founder and Executive Editor of KNACK Magazine and is member of Strangers Collective. She has interned at The Georgia O'Keeffe Research Center and SITE Santa Fe. Her writing has been published in That’s PRD, Strangers, Vol. 1, and The Laurel Review. She has been participant and performed in exhibitions in Guangzhou, China and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some include, Embrace Ambition, (Arte Place Gallery at the Guangzhou Opera House), Fei Gallery’s, Pink Party Summer Festival (One Creative Community Art Park), and Art23 Contemporary Art Gallery. Ariana has been living in Asia since 2015.

November 04, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
ariana lombardi, writing, illustration, sculpture
no land, residency
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Creature Feature

October 30, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in collaboration, no land

A Halloween Market
by Dandelion Guild

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
October 28-29, 2017

Market Hours: 11 am-5 pm

Witches form covens, vampires stick to their clans, and werewolves hunt in packs. In the village of Santa Fe, a group of wildly creative black sheep has established a guild. Calixte Raifsnider’s start-up, Dandelion Guild, sprung from a regional community of makers that was hungry to collaborate. The DIY project’s series of pop-up artisan markets has been building momentum since last spring, when Raifsnider garnered a spot in the 2017 bizMIX Startup Accelerator. This fall, Dandelion Guild unites local artists, vendors, makers and monsters for a Halloween pop-up market at Strangers Collective’s No Land art space on October 28 and 29. CREATURE FEATURE is open both days from 11 am to 5 pm, with tricks and treats provided by Afterlife Alchemy Jewelry, Ashley Blanton, The Bookman & The Lady, Cold Lantern Collection, Jenny Rocks and Lindsay Payton. 

“Each market we create adds another chapter to our story,” says Raifsnider. “This one is shrouded in shadows, but that’s where you find the best treasures.” From the talismanic accessories of Afterlife Alchemy Jewelry to the metamorphic, mixed-media collages of Ashley Blanton, CREATURE FEATURE is Dandelion Guild’s spookiest manifestation yet. Cold Lantern Collection contributes illustrations inspired by classic horror films, Lindsay Payton conjures dark fairytales in her narrative drawings, The Bookman & The Lady unveils a curated collection of horror and dark fantasy novels, and Jenny Rocks offers up beautiful and bizarre found object jewelry. “If you’re looking to gear up for Halloween, there’s be no better place to be on the weekend before the big day,” says Raifsnider.

Raifsnider worked with Betterday Coffee to put together the first Dandelion Guild pop-up last April, and collaborated with Eliza Lutz of Matron Records on a larger, more elaborate manifestation of the market at Ghost in mid-June. She’s been a purveyor of vintage apparel for years, and works with her partner Benjamin Bailey-Buhner to sell rare books under the moniker The Bookman & The Lady. They run both businesses online, but have dreamed of opening a brick-and-mortar location. 

“We found ourselves in the same boat as a lot of DIY vendors we know,” says Bailey-Buhner. “We couldn’t afford a space on our own, so pooling resources made a lot of sense.” Dandelion Guild was their solution, a DIY passion project with a seriously collaborative mission. The company’s name, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s 1957 novel Dandelion Wine, is a reflection of this philosophy. “Dandelion is a lovely, lyrical word, and Guild anchors it,” says Raifsnider. “Our events are really fun and lively, and they also provide support to these professional makers and vendors who are working hard to make a living. It’s hugely inspiring.” 

Dandelion Guild’s participation in bizMIX this spring and summer has helped transform the grassroots endeavor into a full-fledged business, though Raifsnider is intent on preserving the organic energy of her early events. “We want to maintain that dynamic, vibrant, community fun feel, but within a structure,” she says. The pop-up markets are part of Raifsnider’s long-term plan to open a storefront that connects local vendors with treasure hunters.

“Dandelion Guild harnesses the collective power of emerging artists and artisans, a mission we can very much identify with,” says No Land co-director Alex Gill. “We’re excited to add some Halloween mischief to Calixte’s magical brew.” As past Dandelion Guild markets have shown, there are some surprises in store during the weekend of CREATURE FEATURE. “Who knows, there might just be a séance,” hints Raifsnider. 

Poster art: Cold Lantern Collection, Made Like New, digital illustration, 2017, 8 x 10 in.

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Dandelion Guild

Dandelion Guild is curated, collaborative retail committed to forwarding the interests of talented local vendors and makers in Santa Fe. With this in mind, we will combine our resources to create a unique retail environment featuring vintage and handmade clothing, jewelry, books and other accessible art forms.

website.

Afterlife Alchemy Jewelry

Afterlife Alchemy Jewelry is Nature-inspired, earth-embodiment adornment that invokes healing and medicinal protection through talismanic representations. Each Afterlife Alchemy design is cleansed and super-charged with earthen, solar or lunar energy. Jewelry is not just jewelry; it is mystical energy. 

"Jewelry holds power, intention and meaning, creating realms that can emit this magic." 
-Monica Watson, Creative Designer

website.

Ashley Blanton

Ashley Blanton creates metamorphic mutations that are seeking new homes in which to belong. These handmade, original, small mixed media collages on paper are macabre, magical mementos for your walls.

website.

The Bookman & The Lady

The Bookman & The Lady believe in the magic of real objects...be they books or vintage clothing or perhaps the odd bit of ephemera. Combining powers, the two specialize in uncommon and collectible books, with an emphasis on fantasy, science fiction and horror. They also curate a small but colorful explosion of vintage clothing for stylish and eccentric souls.

website.

Cold Lantern Collection

I design and illustrate distinct and sometimes subtle images based on the Horror genre, specifically films. Have been described by others as “Macabre. Comic Booky. Satanic. Eighties.”  Don’t listen to them, they don’t know me. -J.

website.

Jenny Rocks

Jenny Rocks is the alter ego of Jenn Ingram--hot yoga teacher, clerk at Art.i.fact, waitress at Jambo and pet sitter extraordinaire. Jenny Rocks is a jewelry company as diverse as her resume with a sweet side and an edgy side. "Gumball" necklaces, steampunk jewelry, headbands with giant plastic sharks, bug pins, gnome rings, flower clips, and animal barrettes. You never know what you will find at a Jenny Rocks booth! 

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Lindsay Payton

A locally based artist in Santa Fe, NM, Lindsay Payton has always found refuge from every day life in stories. The raconteurs that made up her childhood influenced an eventual need to express her own stories through fiction, and then art.

Two years ago, fiction was put on the back burner to make way for the illustrations that were quickly coming to life. Today, she continues her narrative illustrations featuring children lost in the woods, local urban legends, hidden creatures and ancient fears. Making life less mundane by bringing light to the darkest tales of old so they are never forgotten.

instagram.

October 30, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
dandelion guild, design, illustration
collaboration, no land
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Here Nor There

August 19, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in no land, exhibition

Adriana Barrios & Barbara Justice

An exhibition of experimental prints and photographs

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
August 19-October 1, 2017

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 19, 6-9 pm
Special Reception | Readings from Here Nor There: Friday, September 22, 7-9 pm

Like many early career artists, Barbara Justice and Adriana Barrios have blazed a trail with quite a few switchbacks. Since meeting at the University of Texas-San Antonio, they’ve lived in far-flung places, from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Madison, Wisconsin and Florence, Italy. This summer, Justice and Barrios return to New Mexico for a show of experimental prints and photographs. Both artists reflect on presence and displacement, competing forces that they must contend with as emerging artists. Here Nor There opens at No Land, Strangers Collective’s art space, on Saturday, August 19th from 6-9 pm. A special reception hosted by Katie Johnson and featuring readings from nine local writers will take place on Friday, September 22 from 7-9 pm. Featured writers include Austin Eichelberger, Melinda Freudenberger, Juro Gagne, Steffen D. Garcia, Bucket Siler, Stephanie Thompson, Michael J. Wilson, and Marina Woollven. Here Nor There is on view through Sunday, October 1st. 

Justice and Adriana Barrios are used to creating and exhibiting artwork together – this is their fourth duo show, and they have been a couple for almost ten years. They were married in Santa Fe last July. While studying art for their undergraduate degrees, they were involved in San Antonio’s art community, even running a gallery together for four years in a downtown 1,100-square-foot warehouse. “It was an exhibition space, studio space, and also our living space,” Justice says. Somehow they found the time to put on a new exhibition every month.  But as the rent went up, and the area became more and more gentrified, they decided to move to New Mexico – Justice is from Las Cruces – and they settled in Santa Fe for three years in an attempt to focus on their own artwork (this was from 2012-2015).  Since then, they both completed seven-month artist residencies in Italy, and Barrios was accepted into the MFA program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, which led them to their current location up north. 

Currently pursuing her MFA in printmaking, Barrios’s artwork in Here Nor There combines landscape-based cyanotype photography with patterns of intaglio-printed signs and symbols that play with repetition, variation, and layering. She began creating her ethereal images several years ago while she was completing her artist residency in Italy. “I was pulling out aspects of the landscape and trying to highlight others,” she says. “I’m interested in the lack of relationship that we have with the world around us, and looking at the way that this affects us all.” These one-of-a-kind prints are the result of a complex process that involves drawing, printmaking and photography, through techniques that span the historical and the cutting-edge. “Printmaking continues to change with technology,” Barrios says. “In that sense, past and present are always right there in the studio with you.” 

Justice is a photographer, and her large-format work in Here Nor There plays with double-exposed film. In her photographs, nature-based imagery is juxtaposed with what she calls ‘visual landmarks’ – momentary glimpses within her current urban setting that register to her as extraordinary.  Her time living in Madison has at times consisted simply of a search for the space and quiet that she remembers as being so bountiful in New Mexico: “It’s the space,” she says. “Where I am now, I can’t just go out to a desert where there’s nobody else around.”  Fittingly, when she goes out on a film shoot, she makes sure to do it in the early mornings, when it’s just her and the landscape. Even though her vividly colored double-exposures evoke a sense of overlap between two simultaneous realities, they also serve as a means of grounding herself in her current one, earnestly depicting her reflections on what it means to be present in an environment.  

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Adriana Barrios

Artist Statement

Altered Landscapes: Over the years I have had the opportunity to spend time in many unique places: Diablo Canyon, Canyon De Chelly and the Black Place, all of which are located in the southwestern United States. For each of these visits, my initial reaction was an intense amount of excitement and fear as I was confronted with something which I recognized as much bigger than myself. I think these reactions were in part due to the vastness, overwhelming beauty, and sense of strength and power from the scale of these environments in comparison to my own body. I attempt to highlight these experiences through printmaking in hopes that they are more than documentations but rather a set of aesthetic experiences that emphasize a larger context. The act of making is an important aspect of my work: utilizing skill and interest in techniques I used printmaking and alternative photography processes to make this body of work. I stated with photographs and drawings that serve as notes and documentation of these experiences, then begin working in the darkroom and printmaking studio. Combining as interest in semiotics and geology I use repetition and layering as a way of formulating content and context. While making these prints, I took into consideration basic fundamental art principals such as form, space and color. I am also very interested in experimenting with composition and how it can impact the outcome of the work. The prints are often worked and reworked again and again until they have reached a point of completion.

Bio

Adriana Barrios was born and raised in San Diego, California. In 2009 she graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree with an emphasis in printmaking. In 2015 Adriana attended an international artist residency in Florence, Italy at Santa Reparata International School of Art. Currently, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts Degree at The University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is a recipient of the Education Graduate Research Fellow Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited regionally in Texas, New Mexico and Wisconsin and internationally in Italy and Mexico. Her most recent work involves her revisiting the coastal landscapes of her upbringing. She is interested in exploring the ways we observe, interact and respond to land in which we live in. She uses printmaking, photography and video to explore these ideas.

website. 

Barbara Justice

Artist Statement

Be Excellent To Each Other is a visual collection of my experience in Madison, Wisconsin. I document surroundings of my new city by photographing details that have become familiar to me on a regular basis. These subjects have become guides for me; they are reference points, in my new environment, and with them I have established a sense of familiarity and comfort. Rather than looking outward into a vast desert southwest landscape of my upbringing, I am now focusing on a place that is new, and therefore attempting to characterize my connection to Madison. I photographed all of the images with a Mamiya RB67 ProS medium format camera and have carefully rewound and reused rolls of film to create double exposures. Although this is somewhat experimental in technique, the pairings of the images are deliberate and planned out. The results of two layered images reveal a visual metaphor for the time I have spent here, covering and uncovering relevant details that play a role in the discovery of my new home.

Bio

Barbara Justice (b. 1975, El Paso, TX) is a southwest native, who grew up in southern New Mexico and west Texas. At a young age, she discovered that making photographic images was her passion and thus completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from The University of Texas at San Antonio in 2009. While living in San Antonio she created Justice Works Studio, and over the course of four years she exhibited emerging and established artists of south Texas. In 2015, Justice completed a seven month artist residency at Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy.  Her series On The White Sands was published in PRYME Magazine, a quarterly publication dedicated to instant film. She is a member of Film Shooters Collective an international collective of film photographers.  Her work has been exhibited in Oregon, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Texas.

website.

August 19, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
adriana barrios, barbara justice, photography, printmaking
no land, exhibition

Ruminations & Remnants

July 22, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in no land, exhibition

A pop-up exhibition of illustrations & prints

by Kat Kinnick & Zahra Marwan

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
July 22-August 6, 2017

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 22, 6-9 pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, August 6, 6-9 pm with Lone Piñon

Kat Kinnick and Zahra Marwan met just a few months ago, and exhibited together for the first time in late June. The joint show was in a red barn at the Rio Grande Community Farm in Albuquerque, with illustrations and prints hanging from the rafters and pinned to alfalfa bales. In a new version of the pop-up exhibition, Kinnick and Marwan travel from the humble farm to a gallery on the Santa Fe Plaza. Though they’ve landed in a more traditional art venue, the artists maintain a down-to-earth philosophy about their work. Both of them blend natural imagery with personal narratives, seeking to connect with diverse audiences. Ruminations & Remnants opens at Strangers Collective’s No Land on Saturday, July 22 from 6-9 pm. The show’s closing reception on Sunday, August 6 features Albuquerque acoustic trio Lone Piñon. 

“It started at the farmer’s market,” says Kinnick. That’s where Marwan sells her illustrations, and Kinnick’s partner Jordan Wax sometimes performs with his band Lone Piñon. “Zahra saw an album cover I designed for Lone Piñon, and reached out to me to do a show,” Kinnick recalls. “She told me that she makes art as her living. I was like, ‘How does this person do this?’” They became fast friends, and have supported each other in their early careers as professional artists.“Kat calls herself an ‘in the closet’ artist, but since we did the last show she’s been making a lot more work,” says Marwan. “She’s inspired me a lot in so many ways as well.”

Kinnick grew up in Albuquerque, and her parents restore Navajo rugs. She studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Even in her time away from the high desert, she made paintings of New Mexico’s flora and fauna. Now living in Santa Fe, she continues to depict the natural world with the intention of bringing viewers back in touch with the wild. She works in watercolor and gouache to bring plants and animals to life on paper and board. “Creating culture is like creating a value system,” she says. “My work represents my heart and my values. I feel like if we knew animals and plants better, and were more connected to them, then we’d live in a healthier world.”  

Marwan was born in Kuwait, and moved to Albuquerque with her family when she was a child. Now an American citizen, she has traveled back and forth several times in the past few years to visit family. Her watercolor-and-ink illustrations capture everyday moments in both places, highlighting differences and similarities between the two cultures that Marwan moves between. Other drawings feature charming portraits of her friends, or scenes from her travels across the world. “I search for certain things that I remember, and invent things as well,” Marwan says. “I blend together real experiences with things that I imagine. Drawing helps gets these things out.” 

When it comes to selling their work, both artists prioritize accessibility. “At the market, some people are like, ‘You shouldn’t be selling your art at a place like this!’” Marwan says. “I’m like, ‘Why can’t it be sold like tomatoes?’”  

At the show’s closing reception on Sunday, August 6, Lone Piñon—who helped connect Kinnick and Marwan—will provide music. The group has revived and updated the Chicano stringband style that once flourished in New Mexico, bringing a devoted and explosive musicianship to Northern New Mexican polkas and chotes, virtuosic Mexican huapango and son calentano, and classic borderlands conjunto. Jordan Wax, Greg Glassman and Noah Martinez are the band’s members. 

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July 22, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
kat kinnick, zahra marwan, illustration, painting
no land, exhibition

Dancing Over 50 Book Launch

June 17, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in collaboration, event, no land

featuring co-author Emmaly Wiederholt
Saturday, June 17, 5-8 pm

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco Street #7

To many professional dancers, early retirement seems like an inevitability. Santa Fe dancer Emmaly Wiederholt spent most of her 20’s in San Francisco, performing in contemporary dance companies. When she was 28, she moved back to her home state of New Mexico, but didn’t leave dance behind. Instead, she embarked on a quest to interview dancers who are decades past their ostensible expiration dates. 

On a series of crowdfunded expeditions through San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, Wiederholt and photographer Gregory Bartning gathered the stories of 54 dancers ranging in age from 50 to 95. The words and images they captured became the independently published book Beauty Is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, which makes its official debut at No Land on Saturday, June 17 from 5-8 pm. Wiederholt will speak and sign books at this special reception, and limited edition prints of Bartning’s photographs from the project will be available for purchase. 

“Our culture celebrates youth and athleticism, but what if we also celebrate the inherent wisdom that comes with a body that has life experience?” says Wiederholt. This idea first came to her in 2012, when she attended a retrospective performance by septuagenarian butoh dancers Eiko Otake and Takashi Koma Otake. The couple, known professionally as Eiko & Koma, have been dancing together for over 50 years. “I was really moved by their capacity as dancers to convey things so simply, clearly and powerfully,” Wiederholt says. “With life experience comes the capacity to emote and to creatively express something that maybe a younger person hasn’t fleshed out or even felt.” 

Wiederholt teamed up with Bartning and began interviewing older dancers for her blog, Stance on Dance. They called the project Dancing Over 50, and sought out practicing dancers in a variety of genres, from ballet and Argentine tango to African and contact improvisation. After each conversation, Bartning photographed the subjects in motion. “We were looking for people who’d been dedicated to understanding themselves through dance for a long period of time,” Wiederholt says. Early in the project, they connected with then 93-year-old Anna Halprin, a pioneer of postmodern dance. “Interviewing her was a pretty big turning point, because we had a big name,” she says. “That helped the project take shape, and other dancers started to come out of the woodwork.” 

By 2015, Wiederholt and Bartning had completed 32 interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. Late that year, they mounted a monumental road trip to all four cities and conducted 25 additional conversations. They also hosted a number of fundraising events to promote an Indiegogo campaign that would help them compile the Stance on Dance blog posts into a book. They completed Beauty Is Experience this year, and the book launch at No Land marks its official debut. The 210-page, 9 x 12 in., hardcover, full color photography book features 54 interviews and over one hundred photographs. The event kicks off Wiederholt’s book tour to each of the cities where interviews were conducted. 

“Emmaly has contributed powerful performances to a number of Strangers Collective exhibitions,” says No Land co-director Kyle Farrell. “When she showed us this project, we were blown away by the dynamic imagery and inspiring insight of these remarkable artists.” Strangers Collective's new art space, No Land, features solo and small group exhibitions by artists, writers and performers. Dedicated to those ready to take the next step in their careers, No Land invites emerging artists to develop and show complete bodies of work. 

For more information and high resolution images, please contact No Land co-directors Jordan Eddy, Alex Gill and Kyle Farrell at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

*All photographs courtesy of Gregory Bartning, Belle Images. 

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June 17, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
emmaly wiederholt, gregory bartning, photography, performance
collaboration, event, no land

Santa Fe Zine Fest

May 20, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in collaboration, pop-up

Strangers Collective at Santa Fe Zine Fest
Saturday, May 20, 11 am-5 pm
Center for Contemporary Arts
1050 Old Pecos Tr.

An annual celebration of zines, comics, and alternative press. Santa Fe's inaugural zine fest will feature 20+ exhibitors showcasing their zines and comics. Come hang out, meet and talk with local artists and zine makers, and buy zines. This event is free and open to the public.

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May 20, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
bucket siler, zines, writing
collaboration, pop-up

Jesús Castillo: Remains

May 19, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in collaboration, event, no land

A poetry reading featuring Jesús Castillo and Sonja Bjelić
Friday, May 19, 8:00 pm

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
Current exhibition | Marcus Zúñiga: Ya Veo

 About seven years ago, Santa Fe poet Jesús Castillo bought a pack of index cards to take notes while he was reading. He was living in Berkeley at the time, in a house full of young writers who’d recently graduated from college. The city was buzzing with literary energy, and Castillo felt inspired to start an ambitious project: a book-length poem. “I realized that each of these index cards made a nice little stanza, and three of them fit on the page,” he says. “For two years after that, I just carried them around with me and filled them out whenever something came up.” The fragments were united in Castillo’s book Remains, which was published by McSweeney’s in early 2016. The book will make its Santa Fe debut at his reading with New York poet Sonja Bjelić at Strangers Collective’s NO LAND art space on Friday, May 19, 8:00 pm. 

“Strangers Collective has always worked to interlink emerging artists and writers in Santa Fe,” says Jordan Eddy, NO LAND Co-director. “When we connected with Jesús and learned about his collaborations with young creatives in the Bay Area, it felt like a perfect fit.” During his time in the Bay Area, Castillo helped organize ‘Lectric Collective, a collaboration that brought poets and visual artists together to produce exhibitions. The reading at NO LAND is a return to form: Castillo and Bjelić will read among the new media artworks of Marcus Zúñiga, whose solo show Ya Veo is on view at NO LAND through June 11. 

Jesús Castillo was born in 1986 in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He moved to California with his parents and sister in 1998. In 2009, he graduated with a BA in literature and writing from the University of California-San Diego and moved to the Bay Area. There, he took an interest in the poetry of Ron Silliman and Ben Lerner. “They were working on this thing called the serial poem, which was not a single-page poem, but a long poem in sections, structured as a book,” he says. “I started messing around trying to see if I could figure out a way to create a longer poem out of short fragments.” That’s when the index cards floated into his life, and Castillo started spinning an epic poem on pages that could fit in his pocket. 

About halfway through the writing process, Castillo made a chance connection with an editor from McSweeney’s at a ‘Lectric Collective reading. They provided him with a small advance, and about four years later the poems were in print. “Castillo has created a sprawling contemporary epic that channels the mighty voices of the past (Ovid, Sappho) into a plainspoken song of our times,” writes McSweeney’s of Remains. “The book is lovingly relentless, quietly piercing. It is a terrifyingly recognizable call: it is filled with all of our voices, our panic, our modern love, our screens, our roommate’s cough, our melting icebergs, our planes and malls and frailties.” 

Each page of Remains is divided into three stanzas, a reflection of their origins on the index cards. “I wanted to make a complete landscape. If you have a larger canvas, you can say more stuff,” says Castillo. “Creating that structure actually allows for more freedom.” Castillo says the book captures an emotional arc in his life, though the stanzas were written to be broken apart and rearranged—much like shuffling index cards. “When I read from it, I like to read different parts of it, come up with new orders to see what happens,” Castillo says. “To me, the interesting parts are the jumps between stanzas, so messing around to see what different kinds of jumps you can find is cool.”

For more information and high resolution images, please contact NO LAND co-directors Jordan Eddy, Alex Gill and Kyle Farrell at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

Jesús Castillo

Jesús Castillo was born in 1986 in San Luis Potosí, Mexico and moved to California with his parents and sister in 1998. He studied literature and writing at the University of California-San Diego, and earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first book, Remains, was published by McSweeney’s in 2016, and he was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2017. He has worked at a counseling center for victims and perpetrators of domestic violence, in Santa Fe, NM for the past year.

Sonja Bjelić

Sonja Bjelić lives in New York City where she is earning an M.F.A. in Poetry from N.Y.U. She studied Poetry and Indigenous Liberal Studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and her poems have been translated into Serbian and Spanish. She is currently at work on her first book.

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May 19, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
jesus castillo, sonja bjelic, writing, performance, poetry
collaboration, event, no land

Marcus Zúñiga: YA VEO

April 08, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in no land, exhibition

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
April 8 - June 11, 2017

Grand Opening | Saturday, April 8, 6-9 pm
Artist Talk | Saturday, April 15, 6 pm
Closing Reception | Saturday, June 10, 6-9 pm

Strangers Collective’s NO LAND art space transforms into a futuristic planetarium for its inaugural exhibition. In his solo show Ya Veo, Marcus Zúñiga incorporates cosmic imagery into new media projections and sculptures, opening windows into the universe by manipulating footage that he captures through a telescope. Mapping the constellations has helped Zúñiga trace his Mexican-American roots—and tell a story that traverses human history. Ya Veo, meaning “I see” in Spanish, is an invitation to viewers to ponder their place in the universe.

The debut of the show on April 8 coincided with the grand opening of NO LAND on Saturday, April 8 from 6-9 pm, and it runs through June 10, 2017.  Zúñiga conducted an artist talk at NO LAND on Saturday, April 15, 6 pm. The exhibition's closing reception (June 10, 6-9 pm) coincides with the opening weekend of the Currents New Media Festival 2017. The two-week festival features new media art from across the world, and partners with art spaces around Santa Fe to present satellite shows and events. 

“My work is about perception of the universe,” says Zúñiga. “It’s part of a conversation that spans millennia, and can’t be resolved with a simple yes or no.” He first tuned into this cosmic exchange as a child growing up in New Mexico. Zúñiga was born in Silver City, and his family lived in seven different towns throughout the state during his youth. “I would win science fairs with projects about the solar system, and watch eight-hour documentaries on the chemical compositions of stars,” Zúñiga says. He was excited to learn that his Aztec ancestors were equally attracted to studying the stars. Perhaps cracking cosmological mysteries could help him understand his own DNA. 

In 2009, Zúñiga enrolled at the University of New Mexico to study video art. “I never pursued astronomy seriously because it always seemed too dry to think about it in a very scientific way,” he says. “Through art, I could experience concepts of the universe—and create those experiences. That’s what set me off.” Near the end of his time at UNM, he created a video collage of a hawk in flight overlaid on the sun. The piece felt like a breakthrough, and he tried to replicate its success after graduating with his BFA in 2013 and taking an internship at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson. It wasn’t until he moved to Santa Fe in summer 2014 that his first body of work started to take shape. After completing an internship with SITE Santa Fe, he took a job at Peters Projects, and connected with new media artists who became his mentors. 

“Peters had this five-monitor installation by Steina Vasulka,” he says. “It was an electronic, monumental piece with a very Fluxus feel to it. The fact that a gallery was supporting experimental art, that showed me new possibilities.” Another new media work by Lita Albuquerque inspired him to study her efforts to bring serious scientific conversations into the art world.

By summer 2015, he was spending his evenings with a camera pressed against the viewfinder of a telescope. He would capture cosmic events and send them spinning into the digital world, editing the imagery and inserting fragments of computer code to aesthetically communicate specific scientific concepts. “The technological aspect of video is, to me, what keeps the medium I work with so relevant to the world,” he says. “Video is so important to how we receive information every day.”

Ya Veo, Zúñiga’s first solo exhibition, represents two years of astronomical exploration. The eight works in the show include videos, photographs and new media sculptures. High quality prints will also be available for purchase. “Strangers Collective’s goal with the NO LAND project is to spotlight emerging artists who are ready for the next phase of their careers,” says Kyle Farrell, co-director of NO LAND. “Marcus showed us this rich, diverse body of work that is conceptually rigorous but also captures unbridled wonder.” He is currently in preparations to participate in the Art Center College of Design Graduate Art MFA program in Pasadena, CA for the fall 2017 term. Zúñiga has appeared in two Strangers Collective group shows: Narrows at Santa Fe Community Gallery in spring 2016, and Long Echo at Center for Contemporary Arts in fall 2016. 

To title his works, Zúñiga incorporates Spanish and Nahuatl (Aztec) words and phrases. It’s a nod to the highly personal experience of viewing the sky, which connects to a universal human experience. “This is what the moon is called in Spanish, or Nahuatl,” Zúñiga says. “It might feel foreign at first, but everyone has an experience of the moon. If we start thinking about the cosmos in ways that Egyptians or Chinese or Indigenous people think about it, all of these narratives converge. It just becomes this world in the sky.” 

For more information and high resolution images, please contact NO LAND co-directors Jordan Eddy, Alex Gill and Kyle Farrell at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

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April 08, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
marcus zuniga, new media, photography
no land, exhibition

NO LAND Grand Opening

April 08, 2017 by Jordan Eddy in no land, event

54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
Saturday, April 8, 6-9 pm

Alternative art projects and collectives aren’t just making waves anymore in Santa Fe. They’ve arrived: Siler, Rufina, Hickox, and Baca all feature experimental art spaces and disruptive collectives that challenge the Santa Fe status quo. This spring, Strangers Collective opens NO LAND, an art space that signals a new phase of this sea change, with a location in the heart of the City Different—the Santa Fe Plaza. The grand opening of NO LAND is on Saturday, April 8 from 6-9 pm at 54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7.

Curated by Strangers Collective, NO LAND will feature solo and small group exhibitions by artists, writers and performers, and also host collaborative events with other local creatives. Dedicated to those ready to take the next step in their careers, NO LAND gives artists the opportunity to develop and show full-fledged bodies of work. NO LAND will also house a permanent zine library and merchandise store of affordably priced items.

Strangers originally used the ‘No Land’ title for their fall 2015 exhibition at Wheelhouse Gallery. “It evokes a no man’s land, an in-between place that emerging creatives often roam,” says Kyle Farrell, co-director of NO LAND. “We’re shining light on that space, and creating a platform for diverse voices that aren’t often heard in the Santa Fe art community.” 

Strangers began in fall 2014, in a living room in Santa Fe’s historic district. For the past two years, the group has worked with painters, printmakers, performers, photographers, writers, poets, and more, in venues from the Center for Contemporary Arts to Art.i.Fact. They now enter a space formerly used by prominent Santa Fe curator Eileen Braziel.

“It’s time for a new kind of artist to show on the Plaza,” says co-director Jordan Eddy. “We’ve been working hard to rally the emerging art community, and there’s a huge demand for fresh, multilayered stories in this town.” The existence of a permanent space downtown allows Strangers to synthesize all of these skills and interests in front of the world, right on East San Francisco St. The first exhibition in the space will be Ya Veo, a solo exhibition of new media by local artist Marcus Zúñiga, opening April 8th, 2017. 

April 08, 2017 /Jordan Eddy
kyle farrell, jordan eddy, alex gill, marcus zuniga
no land, event
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No Land
54 ½ E. San Francisco Street, #7
Santa Fe, NM 87501
strangersartcollective@gmail.com

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