ON A.I.R. - Conversations with Artists in Residence

A conversation between legendary composer and sound-gatherer Stuart Dempster, and artist Tonya Lockyer, celebrating the Cistern at Fort Worden State Park and its part in Deep Listening and new music development. “Our conversation is about deep listening and creative friendships and lost sounds, the intricacies of harmony and reverberation, how parks should protect their sounds as much as they protect their fauna, and what it's like to create seminal moments in music. We travel from the streetcars of San Francisco to Carnegie Hall, but it begins right here at Centrum in the sonic depths under Fort Worden, in the Cistern.” – Tonya Lockyer Hosted by Tonya Lockyer Produced by Tonya Lockyer and BC Campbell Engineered and mixed by BC Campbell Recorded: Summer 2023 Length: 55 minutes Special thanks to Centrum, Michelle Hagewood, Renko Dempster, Shin Yu Pai. Mentioned in the Podcast * indicates recorded in the Centrum Cistern One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann Pauline Oliveros Official Website “7-Up” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band* “Lear” from Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis* “Trog Arena” from Troglodyte’s Delight by The Deep Listening Band Courtesy of The Pauline Oliveros Trust and The Ministry of Maåt. Members ASCAP (PoPandMoM.org) “Balloon Payment” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band* “Melodic Communion” from Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel by Stuart Dempster* “In C” by Terry Riley “Standing Waves” from In The Great Abbey Of Clement VI by Stuart Dempster

Ari Mokdad and Frank Abe discuss the poignant ways that their respective family histories have played significantly into the themes and approaches of their work. Both residents discuss their range in processes to screenwriting, poetry, and the multiple disciplines they’ve each engaged with over their careers. Frank Abe Frank Abe has worked to reframe the public’s understanding of the WW2 incarceration of Japanese Americans ever since helping create the first Day of Remembrance for the camps in the campaign for redress and reparations. He is co-author of a new graphic novel, “WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration” (Chin Music Press, 2021) and wrote and directed the award-winning documentary “Conscience and the Constitution” (PBS, 2000) on the largest organized resistance to the camps. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of “JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy” (University of Washington Press, 2018) and is currently co-editing a new anthology of camp literature for Penguin Classics. For his Centrum residency he will be working on a project to to bring those stories to the stage. He’s contributed to Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, and others, and is a past attendee of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. He blogs at Resisters.com. Ari L Mokdad Ari L Mokdad is a Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, and performance artist. She is a first-generation American and daughter of Lebanese immigrants. Ari graduated from Grand Valley State University with a BA in Dance, English, and Writing. She received an MA in English from Wayne State University and is currently completing her MFA at Warren Wilson College. Ari’s creative work coalesces around nature, identity, place, and embodiment. She is an active naturalist and maintains an apiary, greenhouse, and heirloom garden. Ari lives with her partner in Northern Michigan on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomie people, The People of the Three Fires.

Allie Hankins and Hexe Fey compare notes on how they manage expectations for their work, follow curiosities, and conquer insecurities within their processes. Allie Hankins Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and maker who recently performed in a dream wherein she announced “Today I am Truit” before jumping into a pool. The next day in waking life she learned that ‘truit’ is a word used by the lucid dreaming community to mean ‘trout’. In waking life, Allie is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt, and in 2013 she co-founded Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com. Hexe Fey An interdisciplinary indigenous transgender digital storyteller, movement and contemporary dance student, and community harm reduction worker; Hexe Fey uses interactive fiction and nonlinear narrative along with glitch art to communicate vignettes of queer experience, migration, human, nonhuman and technology relations, and ancestral teachings. Hexe is the author of ‘Cursed Task’, an interactive fiction game about the struggle of writing artist bios.

We’re continuing to listen in on the 2021 Emerging Artist Residents! In this episode Angelic Goldsky and Hayla Ragland talk through their intermedia practices and the ways that their backgrounds, the site of Fort Worden, and time for focus has affected their work. Listen to a special track from Angelic and gain a deep insight into the future archives that both Hayla and Angelic are creating. This conversation is generous, worth listening to in its entirety, and full of various ways to think about transformation and from what art emerges and where it can take us. Angelic GoldskyAngelic Goldsky [t(he)y] is Russian-Jewish trans-gender, queer poetry-excavator and performer. They have been honored to transmute words across Turtle Island and Europe, unearthing what was once buried in silencing language. Goldsky likes to rip apart and release definitions of queerness, transness, spirituality, refuge, migration and exile. They do this through clownery, spoken word music, and performance sorcery, leading them international stages with rabbis, queer clowns, trans politicians, the United Nations, TEDx and the Vogue Theatre. They have been published in Frontier Poetry and SAD Mag among other journals, as well as work on the editorial board of the Room Magazine. They have performed embodiment work exploring radical presence at the Belkin Art Gallery’s Spill: Response and the Or Gallery’s Resurgence exhibition. Goldsky has developed programs in partnership with The Museum of Anthropology, Jewish Queer Trans Vancouver and Everybody Is In Downtown Eastside, working in community cohesion through art and media. They love creating arts space where everyone can be celebrated and honored in full spectrum. They are currently the Poet in Residence at Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, leading various community arts engagement programs for youth and the LGBTQQ2SIA+ community. Angelic has been known to hate taxidermies and love timelessness. Hayla RaglandHayla Ragland is a Seattle-based intermedia artist. They received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Psychology from University of Kentucky, where they were a John R. Gaines Fellow for the Humanities. The artist’s practice is responsive to their work in social and cognitive psychology, including work at the Markey Cancer Center, the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and as a caregiver. Ragland’s artwork maintains concerns for cognition, behavior, and health, and their interventionary roles in social constructs and racialized histories. Using textile, sculpture, and photography, they constructs motifs of the unsound body, investigating the seat of the grotesque in contemporary visual culture, with respect to race, gender, ability, and mediated conceptions of worth. Ragland has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Artscape Gibraltar in Toronto Canada, and is the May 2021 resident at Oxbow, Seattle. They are the recipient of a Chinese travel grant from the Confucius Institute and a Names Fellow Award from the Photographic Center Northwest. Their most recent solo show, entitled /Sections, was on view at Shift Gallery, in Seattle, Washington in January of 2021.

In October 2021, six artists were juried into Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency and received stipends, housing, and studio space for one month at Fort Worden State Park. Artists paired up towards the end of their residencies to chat with one another about what they were working on and thinking about after weeks of being in residence. Mel Carter and Woodrow Hunt kick off this series and chat about the ways that expectations changed because of the location and openness of the residency. They share thoughts on the history of the Fort as it relates to colonization and the ongoing stories that are unfolding and full of potential. Carter and Hunt discuss the ways that research and daily practice connect them to experiments and research into liquid spells, healing medicines, and tattoo practices specific to their cultural ancestries. Mel Carter Mel Carter is a Yonsei (fourth generation) Japanese American and non-binary femme based in Seattle on Coast Salish and Duwamish lands. Experiences within the Japanese diaspora, queerness, exploration in modern witchcraft, rituals, and mythology inform their art practice, working in tandem with waste reduction and environmental justice in the cultural context of the Pacific Northwest. Dropping through actions of the everyday mundane and focusing on the inherently magical properties of domestic spheres, their work is influenced by marine ecosystems, elements from fables, and traditional Japanese imagery. With a refusal to work within a specified medium, impermanent materials for mortality like food and plants are often used combined with elements of sculpture, garments, and textiles within a performance or installation. Woodrow Hunt Woodrow Hunt is an artist of Klamath, Modoc and Cherokee descent. Woodrow was born and raised in Portland, OR where he is currently making work. Woodrow’s film practice is focused on documentary and experimental forms. His experimental work explores the functions and relationship between digital video and memory and the ways digital video can communicate issues related to the Native community. His film production company, Tule Films, provides video services to Tribes, Native businesses and organizations, or to projects which collaborate directly with the Native community; many of which are focused on education. His films have screened at the Portland International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and other festivals internationally including his most recent screening at MoMA DocFortnight 2021. His work has been included in the ArtForum print article “Artists’ Artists 2020,” the Boston Art Review, and Hyperallergic’s online articles about COUSIN Collective. Woodrow and his creative collaborator Olivia Camfield (Mvskoke Creek) are featured artists of COUSIN Collective.

This is part three of a four-part series put together by Centrum and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Hazard to ask “what is queer ecology?” of climate scientists, ecologists, choreographers, poets, and creatives who each share unique perspectives on how queer and trans identities can and do play important roles in shifting the way we think about the sciences and our relations with the more-than-human. This project is part of Woelfle-Erskine and Hazard’s 2019-2020 Centrum Northwest Heritage residencies, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts. In this conversation, Hazard and Woelfle-Erskine speak with Jocine Velasco about the urgency and many threads of exploring questions around queer ecologies. They reflect on the relationships between climate and social behaviors, working with and in acknowledgement of Indigenous, prison, and climate justice issues, and an array of experiences and questions that inform their work. Jocine Velasco immigrated from the Philippines with her family to the gulf coast of Florida when she was a child. Velasco was an urban farmer in New Orleans before began pursuing a Masters in landscape architecture at University of Washington where she is working on a thesis which reimagines Puget Sound prairie ecological restoration through an anti-colonial and abolition framework. Velasco writes poetry, does watercolor and collage whenever she can.

This episode is part of a series put together by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Hazard to ask “what is queer ecology?” of climate scientists, ecologists, choreographers, poets, and creatives who each share unique perspectives on how queer and trans identities can and do play important roles in shifting the way we think about the sciences and our relations with the more-than-human. This project is part of Woelfle-Erskine and Hazard’s 2019-2020 Centrum Northwest Heritage residencies, made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts. In Part 1, Michelle Hagewood sits down with these creative folks to learn more about what brought them to this work, what it means to them, and what the past couple of years have looked like in their work, play, and pandemic-affected lives. We learn a bit of what we have to look forward to in the interviews that will follow. Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a Seattle-based artist-scholar whose work includes photography, video, street theater, and scientific investigation as participatory performance. Cleo’s scientific collaborations with tribes and grassroots groups investigate projects to restore rivers and coastal zones to benefit salmon and recharge groundwater to adapt to changing climates, and have been funded by the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and the National Science Foundation. Cleo is the author, most recently, of “Fishy Pleasures: Unsettling fish hatching and fish catching on Pacific frontiers” (Imaginations 2019) and the forthcoming monograph Underflows: Transfiguring Rivers, Queering Ecology (UW Press). July Hazard is a poet from Kentucky who’s currently in Seattle, with parts left behind in a long list of cities, rivers, and truck stops on the way. July’s current research investigates the altered shorelines of the Black and Duwamish rivers, the assembly of poetic voice under the guidance of animals, and the forest relations of trans and queer youth in rural Appalachia. July teaches in the University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas Department and Program on the Environment. Together, they collaborate with other artists, scientists, and activists to investigate hidden flows and suppressed ways of being, and to evoke new relations among people and the more-than-human world. Often, these collaborations form uprisings of an ever-shifting art & science collective called the Water Underground. Their shared work has been seen at venues ranging from derelict rail yards and street protests to museums and science conferences—including SomARTS, CounterPulse, the Crocker Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery, the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, and the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, the Bay Delta Science Conference, on Sproul Plaza during Occupy Berkeley, and wheat-pasted around Oakland, California. Their performance installation “Tell A Salmon Your Troubles” won the inaugural Making and Doing Prize at the 2015 Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting.

The second in our series of conversations with Centrum’s 2020 Emerging Artists. In this installment Michelle Hagewood chats with Dawn Stetzel about the evolution and processes within her work. Stetzel generously shares her thoughts on how the work deals with safety, edges, and elements of the ridiculous. She talks through the way the works are performed and documented, and the nuanced ways in which she approaches thinking about place. Dawn Stetzel is an artist living in the USA on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Living in a place of tides and tsunamis where “land is not always land, sometimes it is water”, has informed her work regarding home and perceptions of safety. She has an MFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and recently exhibited her performative sculpture at the Portland Biennial in Oregon.

Incoming Northwest Heritage Centrum resident, Alice Gosti, invites Bebe Miller to have a conversation about dance, movement, and the context of their practices in the current moment. The two choreographers discover overlapping formative pedagogies and talk through the spatial experiences of zoom, intimacy and vulnerability in their bodies of work, the cultivation of collaboration and play, and the multiple influences of place, language, and connections with people. Listening to this conversation is a dance for the mind and offers new ways to think about how we move through the world. Alice Gosti is an Italian-American choreographer, hybrid performance artist, curator and architect of experiences. Alongside her company members, she has been working in public spaces and exploring unconventional performances since 2013. Gosti’s work uses the world, landscapes, and pre-existing architectures as stages. Recent productions include How to become a partisan (Velocity Dance Center, 2015) and Material Deviance in Contemporary American Culture (On the Boards, 2018). Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, commissions and residencies including being a recipient of the 2012 Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance Award, the 2012 ImPulsTanz danceWEB scholarship, a 2013 Bossak/Heilbron Award, part of the 2015 inaugural Intiman Theatre Emerging Artist Program as a Director, a 2015 Artist Trust GAP Grant, a 2015 and 2017 Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Award, a 2017 Artist Trust Fellowship, a 2016 NEFA National Dance Project Production and Touring Grant and, the inaugural Italian Council Grant from the Italian Government. In 2013 she founded the Yellow Fish // Epic Durational Performance Festival, the world’s only festival dedicated to durational performance. Gosti is also a recipient of Centrum’s Northwest Heritage Residency program in 2020. Bebe Miller first performed her work at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop in 1978. Her choreography has been commissioned by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company and a host of colleges and universities. Since its forming in 1985 Bebe Miller Company has performed nationally and in Great Britain, Europe, South America, Australia, Africa and the Caribbean. Over the last decade the Company has produced a variety of digital archive projects referencing the company’s creative practice. Her latest ebook, How Dancing Is Built: The Making of In A Rhythm, is available online. Bebe is one of the 2012 inaugural class of Doris Duke Artist Award recipients, as well as a 2010 United States Artists Ford Fellow. She has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards, was a 2015 Movement Research Gala honoree and a 2020 Danspace Project Gala honoree, to be celebrated in 2021. Bebe was a Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance from 2000 through 2016, and has received honorary doctorates from Ursinus College and Franklin & Marshall College. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

For this episode, we hone in on a project put together by one of our recent artists-in-residence, Aaron Asis. After installing Fort Words at Fort Worden State Park, Asis interviews two of the voices that influenced and crossed over with the project. Marlin Holden, Jamestown S'Klallam Elder, shares stories of the S'Klallam people, upon whose land the Fort sits, and what the continued relationship and presence of the tribes has been with Fort Worden. Shelly Leavens, Executive Director, Jefferson County Historical Society, discusses her practice as an oral historian and the significance of capturing oral storytelling through her work with museums, historical societies, and beyond. Fort Words is a public art installation created by Asis to celebrate the inspired conditions and historic significance at Fort Worden State Park. These temporary installations are drawn from local oral histories, collections of historic texts, and public testimonials to give voice to these battery sites and share stories of the Forts dynamic history with park visitors — through October 31st, 2020. Fort Words was developed with support from Centrum, Jefferson County Historical Society, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Fort Worden Public Development Authority, Coastal Artillery Museum, Friends of Fort Worden, Ignition Arts — with special support from the Port Townsend Arts Commission, and Washington State Parks & Recreation. 01:25 – Michelle Hagewood and Aaron Asis 28:50 – Aaron Asis and Marlin Holden 58:30 – Aaron Asis and Shelly Leavens.

Daniel Coka and Leon Finley compare notes on the ways that they are each questioning their art practices, how audience factors into their histories with performance, and the ways that ritual, pyschomagical, and drawing practices function as modes of healing and connecting with self. They share experiences of navigating cultural appropriation and un-learning harmful idealogies that come out of art school and patriarchy. This conversation is part of a collaboration between Centrum and New Archives, focused on supporting dialogue between artists across the Northwest. Curated by Satpreet Kahlon, editor for New Archives, the conversations will also be published in a condensed form at new-archives.org. New Archives is an online journal covering art exhibitions, events, conversations and projects along the Pacific side of BC, Washington and Oregon, west of the Cascades (roughly, from Vancouver BC to Eugene, OR). We are based in Seattle and come to publishing by way of being artists, curators, and community organizers. Daniel Coka was born in New Jersey, USA in 1990. He grew up in a Latino migrant community from Ecuadorian parents. Coka has lived in between the US and Ecuador since he was born in 1990. He received a diploma in Visual Arts and Digital Cinema from the University of Cuenca, Ecuador. He works primarily with actions registered in video and audio, but he has also produced in drawing, writing and painting. His work is a constant exploration of identity, in which the label cuir (Spanish for queer) has prompted an intense questioning process, while also addressing race, nationality, latinidad and masculinity. He currently lives and works in Portland OR. https://danielcoka.weebly.com/ Leon Finley is an interdisciplinary artist and queer, trans person born in Seattle in 1987. His work moves between performance, sculpture, drawing, sewing and many places in between. His work is created from his experience having a physical and spiritual body and explores relationships between all kinds of bodies: human, animal, plant, object, sound and the unseen. Leon is a Tarot Card reader and offers Akashic Records consultations; he understands both practices as interwoven into his work as an artist. Leon was the recipient of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Prize in 2009, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, the Dan David Prize Scholarship in 2012, and was a finalist for The Henry Art Gallery Brink Award in 2017. Leon has shown work around New York and Seattle including galleries such as The Alice and the Jacob Lawrence gallery and has performed in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art as a part of Kevin Beasley’s Public Programs in Sonic Masses and Movement Research as a part of the Open Performance Series. Leon has taught at Cooper Union, Virginia Commonwealth University and Montclair State University. He currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington. http://www.leonfinley.com/about

Former Residency and Youth Programs Manager Martha Worthley catches up with Natalie Goldberg, renowned author and Centrum Artist Resident alum. The two acquaintances reminisce about Goldberg’s first experience at Centrum, her writing and painting philosophies, Zen practice, living with cancer, and the importance of her teaching practice. Worthley shares her own experience of reading Natalie’s work as it relates to her artistic practice and her time at Centrum and at the closing, Natalie treats the listeners to a reading from her upcoming book on Haiku. Martha Worthley is a visual artist and arts educator. As a visiting artist in the schools, she worked with the Port Townsend School District to increase its capacity to provide sequential arts education for grades K-6. She also taught in intensive programs for high school students in the arts through Centrum in Port Townsend. While maintaining a studio practice, Martha spent 7 years as arts editor of the local newspaper, spent a year in Mexico teaching 530 elementary students at the American School of Guadalajara, and then returned home to run Centrum’s arts and education programs for youth in grades 5-12. She has shown her work regionally, and many of her images have been used for posters and festival stage backdrops. In her last few years at Centrum, Martha ran the residency program. She started the Emerging Artist Residency, and worked to improve the vitality of residencies at Centrum, serving hundreds of writers, visual artists, musicians and dancers during her time as director. She is currently working full time in her studio. See more of Worthley’s work on her website: http://www.marthaworthley.com/ Natalie Goldberg is the author of fifteen books, including Writing Down the Bones (Shambhala, 1986), which has sold over one million copies, has been translated into fourteen languages, and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. She recently co-edited a collection of talks by revered zen teacher Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life (Shambhala, 2018). In her latest memoir Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home(Shambhala, 2018), she shares her experience with cancer grounded in her practice of zen and writing. Her other books include The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life (Shambhala, 2016), the novel Banana Rose (Bantam, 1995), and the beloved Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, a memoir about her zen teacher Katagiri Roshi. Natalie is also a prolific painter. Her book Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing (Abrams, 2014), describes painting as her second art form. Top of My Lungs (Overlook Press, 2004) contains forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” Natalie’s paintings are available to

In this first episode, ON A.I.R. producer Tavin Dotson sits down with host Michelle Hagewood, Program Manager for Centrum Residencies to unpack the hopes and thoughts that have gone into podcast. We explore questions surrounding artists and the current challenges of pandemic and social crises, the role of residencies and the creative workforce, and Michelle’s background as an artist, museum educator, and parent. We peek at the Centrum Print Collection archives and acknowledge the rich history of artists at Fort Worden. We discuss the ways that place and space play pivotal roles in artist practices and take on new meanings in 2020. Links and resources mentioned in this episode: www.centrum.org www.michellehagewood.com https://porttownsendvirtualartmuseum.org/Centrum/CentrumGallery.html