Nathan Smerage: The No Land Sessions

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.” 

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.

Dancing Over 50 Book Launch

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. 

Jesús Castillo: Remains

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.

STILL HOWLING

Mary Dezember: Still Howling Launch Party
A Pop-Up Event Presented by Strangers Collective
54 1/2 East San Francisco St.  |  Saturday, December 17, 7:00 pm
Reading begins at 7:15 pm

Allen Ginsberg begins his 1956 poem Howl with the iconic line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .” Sixty years later, Mary Dezember presents an urgent addendum to Ginsberg’s message. Strangers Collective is pleased to host the Santa Fe launch of Dezember’s book of poetry, Still Howling. At the holiday pop-up event on Saturday, December 17, the Albuquerque poet will read from her new collection—and carry the revolutionary howl into the 21st century. 

“I see the best souls of my sex thrive despite the madness…” begins Dezember’s poem Still Howling. In Howl, Ginsberg questions the forces that destroy curious, brilliant minds in a culture that fails to recognize a pervasive holiness. Dezember’s work identifies this invisible influence as a socio-political hegemony that continues to sexualize, suppress and dominate women. Still Howling and Endnote to Still Howling, which mirror the titles of Ginsberg’s poem and its famous footnote, applaud the beat poet’s gift to liberated creatives: “the right to howl.” 

Wielding language that is both piercing and uplifting, Dezember explores the importance of creative expression, and of finding a voice in hurtful or oppressive situations. Still Howling is a rallying cry to question hegemony, and to embrace the realization that life persists through the alchemy of forgiveness. The book features cover art by the poet’s nephew, Steve Dezember II, who used his wheelchair to create stunning abstract imagery. Among the poems in the collection are tributes to courageous, life-embracing innovators such as Steve and his wife Hope, Rosalind Franklin and Georgia O’Keeffe. 

“Still Howling is the drumbeat we’ve been waiting for in unsettling political times,” says Strangers Collective cofounder Jordan Eddy. “Mary’s work will inspire you to forge onwards in the long march towards positive social change.” Dezember will read selections from Still Howling at the pop-up launch party hosted by the emerging arts collective. Signed copies of the book will be available for $9.

Still Howling and Endnote to Still Howling are the First Place Winner of the Best Poem Contest 2016, sponsored by Beatlick Press. They were originally published by the journal Cacti Fur. Dezember believes in freedom of expression, inclusivity, pluralism, and creating awareness that catalyzes healing. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Indiana University and is Professor of English at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where she teaches creative writing, art history and literature. Her first book of poetry, Earth-Marked Like You, was published by Sunstone Press. Read more about this event in Pasatiempo.