Ariana Lombardi | I Know That I Am

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.”

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.

Santa Fe Zine Fest

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.

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.

1905 Magazine Benefit Show

A Pop-Up Event Presented by Strangers Collective
54 1/2 East San Francisco St. #7
Saturday, February 18, 2017, 7-10 pm

There’s a fashion movement brewing in Santa Fe, and the proof is in the pages of 1905 Magazine. Editors Mariah Romero and Darnell Thomas founded the quarterly digital publication in 2014, with the help of their fellow students at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Now they’re taking their first steps into the larger fashion industry, and ushering a community of young style mavens to the cultural forefront in Santa Fe and beyond. Strangers Collective is pleased to present the 1905 Benefit Party, a pop-up fashion event at 54 1/2 East San Francisco Street on Saturday, February 18 from 7-10 pm. Artwork and merchandise from the magazine will be available for purchase at the reception, in support of Thomas and Romero’s sweeping vision for the publication. This event is free and open to the public, and will include complimentary refreshments. 

Thomas and Romero dreamed up 1905 Magazine in a typography class at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design in winter 2014. Romero was a sophomore graphic design student, and Thomas was a junior majoring in business and graphic design. Both of them were interested in fashion, but SFUAD didn’t have any classes on the subject. “We were both working on fashion-related projects, to have something in our portfolios,” says Romero. “We knew other people were also doing photo shoots, and we wanted to create a community to bring it all together.”

The duo chose the title 1905 Magazine as a reference to the birth year of legendary designer Christian Dior, and put together their first issue over winter break in 2014. Up-and-coming designers, photographers, writers, stylists and chefs quickly filled their masthead. For almost a year, they produced monthly issues. Thomas, Romero and their contributors produced editorial fashion spreads using borrowed clothes from local thrift shops, cooked up stunning culinary features in the kitchens of their college apartments, and designed style guides that encouraged their readers to embrace their individuality. 

“We give off the message that you don’t have to be trendy to be stylish,” says Thomas. “It’s not about what’s on the runway at fashion week; that’s what everyone else is doing. You don’t need a lot of money to have an eye for style.” The SFUAD community quickly embraced the new cultural platform. The graphic design department helped fund a print edition of 1905 in spring 2015, and a film student made a documentary about the magazine. That fall, Thomas and Romero switched to a quarterly publication schedule and got serious about polishing up the design and content. The monthly issues often ran over 100 pages, but they worked hard to edit it down to around 60 in 1905’s seasonal manifestation. 

“We want it to look as professional as the magazines we’re looking up to,” says Romero. They’ve examined every detail of Darling, Kinfolk and other arts and culture publications for inspiration. “We want to be at that level,” Romero says. “This isn’t just a student project any more, it’s what we want to do.” Their hard work paid off in 2016: the wildly popular social networking app Snapchat featured some of their images in its Discover feed, and an LA author profiled them for an upcoming lifestyle book. 

Thomas graduated from SFUAD in 2016, and Romero will get her diploma this spring. They didn’t think twice about carrying 1905 Magazine into the professional world with them, and they’re bringing their collaborators along for the ride. The 1905 Magazine Benefit Show will feature photographs and designs by a number of contributors to the publication. SFUAD graphic design professor David Grey, who has mentored Thomas and Romero, will contribute artwork to the exhibition. Andie Fuller, who has contributed recipes to the magazine’s culinary section, collaborated with Romero and Thomas to design a cookbook that will debut at the event. A new line of 1905 Magazine merchandise will also be available, at a price range of $5-$50.

“1905 Magazine represents a new vanguard of local, talented fashion professionals,” says Strangers Collective co-director Kyle Farrell. “They’re already shaping Santa Fe culture, so we’re calling on the community to further elevate this inspiring project.” For more information and high resolution images, contact Jordan Eddy at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

Contributors: Lydia Abernathy, Jennifer Carrillo, David Grey, Laura San Román, Mark Baker-Sanchez, Amy West, Jonathon Duarte, Callan Ramirez, Keynan Johnson, Andie Fuller, Jennie Johnsrud, Mariah Romero & Darnell Thomas.

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.