Ten Minutes in Balasana & Coastal Presence

Jesse Curran

Ten Minutes in Balasana

I came to hatha yoga to deal with stress and low self-esteem. I can be very sensitive, non-confrontational, and have a propensity toward vulnerability. I don’t like being the center of attention or being watched and I suffer from a negative ego. My own worst critic, I came to yoga to take care of me.

Humility, patience, sincerity,

I came to yoga because my dissertation director reminded me to remind myself that I was tall. My dissertation director is a poet. He taught me to read even the most figurative poetry literally. I took that word at face value. Tall. I needed to stop hunching forward and drawing inward. I needed to stand upright and draw the shoulder blades together. To lift my chest like a proud bird. I needed tadasana.

nonviolence, uprightness, purity,

I found a teacher I trusted. I find her beautiful. Her parents are Turkish and she was born in Germany. She is trilingual and her accent soothes me as she guides the class through the poses.From the first class, I felt safe in her foreignness and at home in her compassionate intelligence and disciplined intensity. I later learned that she was raised with Rumi. His teachings and poetry guided her family’s spiritual compass. I never felt judged in her presence. She is among my deepest reasons for gratitude.

devotion to one’s spiritual teacher,

I trust teachers who help their students feel grounded enough to take risks. I gravitate to teachers who do not criticize so much as take seriously the student’s intention to learn. An intention to learn is one of my strongest qualities.

constancy, self-control,

Yoga asana works viscerally. It works before language or conscious awareness. It works with organs and the in the muscle fibers. Internal, intuitive, integrative, integral. It starts at the level of the cells. It hovers between slowness and stillness. A cessation of speed. A quiet holding. Restoring, remaining, reminding.

freedom from the I-sense, insight

A point of fascination: this coming from body into mind. The literal into the metaphorical. An ongoing exploration into the subtle and interconnected layers of experience. A point of great mystery. Mystery accessed only through breath. Spiritus. The biological enmeshment of spirit.

into the evils of birth,

It gives intellectually. A teaching philosophy grounded in a beginner’s mind being ready to begin. A theory of poetry based on the breath. A sense of beauty that cradles the paradox of strength and surrender. A metaphysics that seeks to yoke the fragments born of fear.

sickness, old age, and death,

What I did not expect it to give me is the ability to consume less. To become less of a consumer. That it would offer a personal intervention into the pressing issues of sustainability. Instead, a producer of contentment. A receiver of rest. A professor of poetry. A teacher of tadasana.

detachment, absence of clinging

One’s relationship to hunger changes. Hunger. Literal. Figural. On one hand, the hunger easily mediated by banana or handful of nuts. On the other, the hunger of insatiable discontentment. The hunger of grasping. Both become tempered. Both are occurrences of body and mind that arise and fall away.

to son, wife, family, and home,

And so, needing less. And when needing, knowing what is needed. An apple. Chick peas and olive oil. Brown rice with vegetables. A pint of ice cream can last for two weeks. Just one or two spoons each evening. To be content with a glass of water. To be content.

an unshakeable equanimity

Hunger is no longer hunger. Appetite is no longer appetite. The letting go spirals: to shopping, to planning, to keeping busy. To bargain hunting and searching for fashion. Desire softens into washable cotton, wearing things into the fading and fraying.

in good fortune or in bad,

To be happy staying at home, waiting for the afternoon sun to enter into the break in the canopy of maples that shade the modest apartment. Less need, less worry. A permission to slow down. The world is only opening.

an unwavering devotion to me

Reexamining productivity. Adrift for too long in the suburban crucible of business and beauty. A world of running marathons and radical diets. How counterintuitive restorative yoga practice seems in a culture that is always working to burn calories. Ten minutes a day in child’s pose might do the same work. Hunger is no longer hunger.

above all things, an intense

Ten minutes in balasana.

love of solitude, distaste

Maybe these things happen to all people as they age. The frantic pace of youth cannot endure. Sneakers replace stilettos. Sweatpants replace fitted jeans. Maybe not. Maybe these choices come naturally to some. They didn’t so much for me. I saw enough television growing up to have been deeply affected. I felt enough competition and was exposed to enough images of manicured beauty. I felt impossibly adrift, and often ugly, amidst a reality that could never sustain me. I grew up on Long Island in the shadow of the world’s most photographed city. A city proud of itself for not sleeping.

for involvement in worldly affairs,

Excellent at putting pressure on myself to maintain excellence. A straight-A student. A winner of awards. Phi Beta Kappa. Summa cum laude. Looking like a Christmas tree on graduation, adorned with a dozen tassels. During graduate school, winning the big prizes in teaching and writing. An ongoing involvement in worldly affairs.

persistence in knowing the Self

Addicted to pleasing others. Addicted to being taken seriously. Addicted to validation. Addicted to recognition. Addicted to excellence.

and an awareness of the goal of knowing—

And now, ten minutes in balasana.

all this is called true knowledge;

Thank Shanti and Shiva for poetry and Italy. For the hippies and a plain natural beauty. Thank Whitman for the aroma of armpits and the body being part of the earth. Thank yoga asana for hunger no longer being hunger.

what differs from it is called ignorance.

The greatest terrors of the Anthropocene echo and manifest in the fears and cravings of my own mind. They are perpetuated by each and every action. The psychological dimensions of sustainability are just opening up. The old questions and values are surfacing again. It’s time for less consuming, to shed the old ignorance. It’s time to save and store energy. It’s time to accept responsibility.

I will teach you what should be known;

It’s time for the wisdom of the Tao and of the Gita. It’s time for a turning. Time to switch the televisions off and to let the smart phones break and remain broken. It’s time to turn away from the media and market. Sing songs for mindfulness and a revival of therapeutic philosophy.

knowing it, you are immortal;

And so, some more time in child’s pose. Legs up against the wall. A backbend as a reminder of release and a headstand to flood the anxious edge with warmth. I’ve learned I can have these things just about anywhere and they don’t have a carbon footprint. Balasana. As much child’s pose as I want. No one is stopping me. It’s here. It’s right now. The supreme reality—right here—within me.

It is the supreme reality,

A craving is no longer a craving. Rather, a resting. A breathing. The conservation

which transcends both being and nonbeing.1

of energy.

1 The italicized passage comes from Chapter 13 of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Bhagavad Gita (New York:Harmony Books, 2002).

Jesse Curran holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University and is an educator, gardener, and yoga instructor. Her poetry and essays have been published in numerous journals including, The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Journal of Sustainability Education, Green Humanities, Blueline, The Fourth River, About Place Journal, Lime Hawk, Spillway, and The Common Ground Review.

Rachel Eastman is a native of Maine, graduating with honors from Maine College of Art, where she worked with Johnnie Winona Ross, Ed Douglas, and Honour Mack. She later attended Vermont Studio Center, working with Wolf Kahn and Lois Dodd, as well as conducting independent studies in Paris, London, and The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. In recent years, Eastman’s interest in Eastern Philosophy,and Romanticism have begun to merge with perennial influences Joseph Mallord William Turner, Frederic Church, and Mark Rothko as her passion for color and light meet the Maine coastline. Currently maintaining studios from the ocean’s edge in Biddeford, Maine,and from the majestic vista views of Evan’s Notch Chatham, in New Hampshire.

Featured Artist: Kenny Cole’s Flood

Written by Alecia Sudmeyer October 29, 2015 Sound Visual Art

Kenny Cole

FLOOD

Flood 036, 2014

Flood was generated, for me, through a random Yahoo News item that caught my attention. The article was about the vanishing Moken Sea Nomads of Thailand/Myanmar. Every once in a while I’ll read most or all of a comment stream. I love their often wild and woolly nature, have transcribed some into past drawings and after reading this article I felt ready to try it again. The comments that followed this particular article ended up being around 30,000 words. I transcribed, or painted these comments on to 7” x 8.5” drawing paper using gouache, an opaque watercolor medium. It was important that I considered these transcriptions as works of art, thus I “painted” them and the compositional space of the picture plane or rectangle took precedence over the proper rules for ending sentences, words or shaping paragraphs. I ran the text right to the edge of the drawing paper even if it cut into a word in an unreadable way. Following these rules, the full text of the 30,000-word comment stream led me to create a total 320 drawings. Additionally I circled out, within this text the story of Noah’s Ark, as written in the bible, through the story of the Tower of Babel, on through to the beginning of the story of Abraham. “Flood” was exhibited in its complete form at BUOY in Kittery, Maine From July 10 through September 5, 2015.

(The following is an excerpt from an interview published in 2014 Artvoices Magazine 7th Annual Winter Basel issue.)

Ellen Caldwell: In your recent series “Flood,” you juxtapose Internet commentary following an article about the alleged decline of the nomadic Moken people of Myanmar with biblical verses about Noah’s epic. These seemingly chance parallels of texts end up aligning quite beautifully and tragically in exploring the current state of both our environmental and personal communicative degradation. Highlighting the comment section of our media is so interesting to me, because I think we often see a real break down of humanity there. Could you speak to this a bit?

Kenny Cole: But, despite this I also see a genuine struggle to find truth. We are all uninformed about something, or we all hold our own set of false ideas or myths that we might not recognize or acknowledge. We may know a lot about some things but no one knows everything about everything. An astrophysicist may not know how to lay a hardwood floor for example, so he probably has no business even discussing how it’s done, though he might add an interesting insight.

As far as the world’s problems go, I think that we really need all the help we can get and I guess I am willing to sift through a wild and wooly online comment stream to tease out truths. People say dumb things, but if we really listen there is usually a “truth” in there somewhere. We tend to have our own beliefs and raise a defense when we feel that our beliefs are challenged, so that’s probably the “degradation” part of this thing we call humanity.

As far as being an artist and approaching the world’s problems through an aesthetic process, which in this case is the drawing of a comment stream, I find myself reading and re-reading this text in order to transcribe it. This gives me a deeper insight into what is being said. I hear rhythms, see patterns, make connections with the ancient ideas, symbols and archetypes of the biblical themes. It’s a far cry from the modern phenomenon of constantly being interrupted with communication that can barely be processed. I like the idea of freezing this snippet of modern communication into a work of art.

“The effect of the work, whether one reads its contents or not, is of an analogue for the digital onslaught that our devices connect us to on a daily basis (the gallery is also littered with wood, dummy smart phones). It is a common trope to say we are bombarded by images but we are also flooded with an unstoppable stream of words, adding to the existing oceans of writing we will never have time to explore. Do we actually read the text of the Bible and attempt to make first hand sense of this mysterious document, at the creative center of Western Culture, or do we float along on the 30,000 word comment stream, of half formed thoughts tossed off in a rage by amateur thinkers, relating to an article we will soon forget. I suspect most of us will choose the latter, and I often do.” – (2015 Seasick Magazine / Hurricane season issue “Flood” review by Narciso Philistratus)

Ellen Caldwell: How do you see the virtual and digital world impacting our engagement with the everyday and ephemeral?

Kenny Cole: Well, although I do not quite consider myself a painter, I see myself as trying to save painting! Painting has died many times before, but it has a very strange persistence. It has permanence and speaks a great deal to our condition as animals that build endless and varied structures, for habitation and shelter. There are 10 gazillion walls in the world that we have created and each one begs to hold some kind of message or vision that can speak to us or transform the space it’s in. This is just a phenomenon of our existence.

The digital world exists near this, but functions away and outside of our physical structures. It’s incredibly seductive and addictive, but I feel that it also has an emptiness and limitation in terms of satisfying our need for feeling human. Painting can address our need to feel human nicely … Something like painting is a form that can capture things and hold them before us to see if we want to think about them for a longer while.

Flood 037, 2014

Flood 038, 2014

Flood 039, 2014

Flood 040, 2014

After winning a Charles Burchfield scholarship in 1976, Kenny Cole studied drawing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, earning a B.F.A. in 1981. Upon graduation he was confronted with a burgeoning neo-expressionist art scene in New York City’s East Village, thus his work adopted an edgy, graphic, second-wave graffiti-like sensibility. He joined the planning committee of City Without Walls Gallery in 1983 and exhibited extensively in alternative spaces in and around New York City until moving to Maine in 1994. Here he has continued to exhibit in alternative spaces, has helped organize political art actions with the Union of Maine Visual Artists and served for 10 years on the board of directors at Waterfall Arts in Belfast. Cole was awarded the 2012 Spring Monhegan Island Artists Residency and exhibited an interactive solo installation at the University of Maine Museum of Art’s Zillman Gallery in January 2014. He currently is exhibiting a window installation at the Engine in Biddeford, Maine.

A Look at Cecco d’Ascoli’s Book of Beasts

Written by Alecia Sudmeyer September 24, 2015 Non Fiction Visual Art Words

Professor Diane Murphy

Cecco d’Ascoli’s Book of Beasts

The medieval bestiary, literally a “book of beasts,” is a collection of animal lore that combines observations about the natural world with moral lessons. Bestiaries form part of a literary tradition that can be traced back to earlier genres such as Aesop’s fables. The concept that nature provides us with models for ethical behavior was probably transmitted orally, however, through proverbs and stories told to children. In the Middle Ages, the descriptions of fauna, both real and mythical, were often rhymed and accompanied by whimsical illustrations that continue to fascinate audiences of all ages.

Manuscripts were expensive in the period during which they had to be painstakingly copied by hand. The popularity of bestiaries is attested by the fact that almost every noble family and religious institution in Europe possessed one in their private libraries. With the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, books could be mass produced, but they were still considered luxury items. Even a famous artist like Leonardo da Vinci could afford only a modest collection of approximately forty titles. The list for his library includes a reference to Cecco d’Ascoli, author of the Acerba, which contains a bestiary section that some scholars believe was used as the source for Da Vinci’s own version.

Ironically, neither Da Vinci nor anyone else should have owned a copy of the Acerba, which was banned by papal decree when Cecco was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1327. It seems likely that people in the late Middle Ages, like people today, were attracted by the “off limits” status of the book, which circulated widely in clandestine copies after the author’s death. Cecco’s reputation as a necromancer who disseminated the secrets of black magic to his students has little to do with the actual contents of the Acerba, but there are indications in the text that the astrologer may have prudently decided to exercise a bit of self-censorship while he was under arrest.

Some manuscripts of Cecco’s unfinished encyclopedic poem use the title L’Acerba Età, which can be translated as The Bitter Age. In fact, it’s tempting to interpret many of the messages contained in the book as references to the poet’s own state of mind while attempting to complete his work, knowing that time was running out. The samples from the bestiary included here contain poignant lines that evoke the anguish of a man facing an unjust death sentence ordered by the Inquisition. More information about the historical period during which Cecco lived, which was indeed a “bitter age,” can be found in the English translation available as a digital text through Capponi Editore.

The Phoenix

Love is like the phoenix in this way:
when it feels that its vitality is waning,
it’s born again. Listen to this marvel!
The phoenix, found in eastern deserts,
will beat its wings against the heat
until the motion ignites hot flames.

Then, I tell you, it’s reduced to ashes.
But by means of the moon’s influence,
little by little the phoenix returns to life,
rising from the ashes to its former state.
There’s never more than one in the world,
yet its range expands throughout the East.

In these dark times, anyone facing death
at the hands of deluded, rapacious men
should light desire’s flame in his heart.
As he burns, he’ll sing a righteous song.
Defeating ignorance with fervent faith,
he’ll return to the world via Paradise.

The Tiger

The tiger runs as swiftly as an arrow,
somewhat like its cousin the panther.
It’s always worried about its young.
Hunters use mirrors to cast images
of the cubs, so that the parent tiger,
seeing the likeness, won’t chase them.

Gazing into the mirrors, it believes
that its cubs are safe; then the hunter
flees, quickly getting beyond reach.
When the tiger realizes that it’s been
fooled by shadows, its mind succumbs
to grief and it roars in pain and sorrow.

Thus our enemy the devil deceives us,
using the seductive mirror of illusion
as a trap to strip wisdom from our souls.
How frightening it is to me when I think
of how little time we have on this earth,
and how rapidly our lives can slip away.

The span of a human life flows like water,
and soon we must leave this world behind.

The Crocodile

The crocodile spends the winter in water
and the summer on land, growing rapidly.
Its worst enemy is a type of crested fish.
The upper jaw of the crocodile moves,
while the lower mandible remains still.
Females, in heat, bury eggs in the earth.

Crocodiles never emerge during winter,
but are revived by mild spring weather,
when young plants bolster their strength.
They’ll kill a man as soon as they see him,
but once he dies, the beast begins to cry,
seeming to mourn, with piteous sobbing.

Then, having wept, it chews and devours
the human flesh. If a serpent crawls into
its mouth while the crocodile is sleeping,
it destroys the enemy’s heart and entrails,
not stopping until it dies an agonizing death
that almost seems like an act of vengeance.

Hypocrites and devious men do this.
Their hearts delight in inflicting pain,
while their faces retain a merciful look.
Any little thing seems to make them cry.
They’re untrustworthy and malicious:
watch out, and don’t fall for their traps!

The Oyster

The oyster opens its shell completely
when the moon is full: seeing this,
the crab starts planning its next meal.
It places a stone or a branch inside,
so that the oyster loses its safe cover.
In this way, the crab traps its victim.

Similarly, a man who opens his mouth,
revealing his secrets to a false traitor,
will feel the wound deep in his heart.
Words can be a matter of life and death.
A wise man will always remain silent
in the midst of wicked acquaintances.

If you want to live long, remember:
you’ll never be damned for silence.

The Viper

The female viper is a poisonous snake
that bears her young with great effort
and dies painfully while giving birth.
Once pregnant, she kills her mate
and decapitates him with her teeth,
feeling her heart betrayed by love.

The young snakes are born by tearing
through her side, according to nature,
which rules the instincts of all beasts.
Because they’re full of venom, vipers
sleep in caverns during the cold season:
spring weather brings them out in force.

Their blind eyes can be cured with fennel.
Before engaging in the act of copulation,
the female viper regurgitates her venom;
as soon as her desire has been achieved,
she reabsorbs it and goes on her way,
since poison is essential to their lives.

Some men act this way when they confess,
regurgitating their sins and seeming contrite:
they don’t stop sinning in their hearts, though.
They aren’t truly repentant, even if it seems
they’ve changed, since they always return,
shamefaced, to their previous wicked ways.

*All images courtesy of the British Library, Catalog of Illuminated Manuscripts.

Diane Murphy earned her BA at Brown University and her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on medieval studies. She is currently a Professor of Humanities at Unity College, where she has taught literature, composition and general education courses since 1997. For the past ten years, she has conducted research on Cecco d’Ascoli, author of the Acerba, and has recently published a full translation of the poem, available as a digital edition.

Unity College Students visit with local artist Kenny Cole

Written by Alecia Sudmeyer April 20, 2015 event Visual Art

Unity College students visit with local artist Kenny Cole

Recently, as part of HU2121 Art and Sustainability Science Gallery Series students from the class visited the studio of Kenny Cole of Monroe, ME. He shared his newest project with us “Flood” which deals with a vanishing culture of Sea Nomads from Thailand and a discourse of both biblical and contemporary issues. Kenny will be showing this work later this summer as a solo exhibition at BUOY in Kittery, Maine.

Crow

Written by Alecia Sudmeyer April 15, 2015 Non Fiction Visual Art Words

Alison Hawthorne Deming

CROW

Crows are ubiquitous in the Connecticut hills and fields, the landscape of my childhood. Their feathers shine in sunlight like obsidian. Over a cornfield, a flock of crows is an elegance. Gleaning grubs from a fallow field, it is a society of peasants. Crows fly with patience, their flapping never belabored. Sometimes they glide. They make their own clothing, feathers grown from their skin, every keratinous cell of the calamus, every black silk fiber of the vane, made by the crow, made thoughtlessly and without effort. There is a hollow place in the quill, a space used by veins to supply nutrients while the feather is alive and growing. But the feathers are dead when the crow wears them, a head dress, wing dress, body dress,

basic black, and bearing the lovely sheen of life. For forty million years the iridescence of bird feathers has graced the earth.
But it was the sound of crows that I loved as a child. Ca-aw. Ca-aw. The throaty, emphatic call announced their presence. It rose from cedar trees on the edge of the yard, from that place in the sky just out of sight above the hickory tree or behind the house, it entered the open window of the school bus or the chaotic playground during recess at school. The caws announced some work to be done, some passage to be flown, some sight to be seen, some news to be shared. What was it that made them call like that from the air as they passed on their way? Ca-aw. The syllable bends slightly

downward at the end, almost like the Doppler effect of a passing train. It was a sound I knew well and a voice that made me feel the world was right, that some lives beyond my life were going about their business, being with their being, and I felt suddenly larger than my small self. Even now remembering it, I feel as if I am opening the door and stepping outside into the wonder of things. Crows were always a surprise and never a menace to me.
My father did not like crows. He spent many hours working in his vegetable garden. It was his solace. He started corn from seed, germinating Golden Bantam stock in Dixie cups, then transplanting it into hills he had hoed up in the rocky soil. No sooner

had he tamped the seedlings into the ground, than the crows would fly in to pluck up the tender greens. I saw him storm out of the house with his shotgun many times to teach them a lesson. I’m sure he failed. I was never shocked to see his rage. I empathized with that feeling of helplessness that riled him, though I did not share his hatred of crows.
A group of crows is called a “murder.” It lines up in a festive parade of animal names: flock of sheep, herd of horses, pack of wolves, parliament of owls, cauldron of hawks, bouquet of pheasants, whiteness of swans, murmuration of starlings, gaggle of geese, improbability of shearwaters, newspaper syndicate of gannets, charm of finches, raft of ducks, exaltation of larks, unkindness of ravens. The poor corvids scored low in the judging.
Murder as a group name for crows goes back at least to the 1400s in England. The American Society of Crows and Ravens suggests the origin of the name might be in the folk legend that crows, in their black robes, hold tribunals to judge and punish members of their flock exercising bad behavior.

If found guilty, the crow would be killed by the flock. This notion, the society claims, may be based on observations that a crow will occasionally kill a dying crow that doesn’t belong in their territory or will feed on a dead crow. In medieval times, crows scavenged human remains at gravesides, battlefields, and execution sites
Crows are smart. Crows use tools. They adapt to city life. They rival primates in cognitive ability. In the wild, New Caledonia crows will use a twig to probe in a tree trunk for grubs. In captivity, two crows sharing an enclosure learned to retrieve bits of pig heart, their favorite food, from a bucket. The male chose the hooked wire, which did the job well, so the female took the straight wire and bent it into a hook, using it to lift the small bucket of food from a vertical pipe. She had no other crows to model the behavior, little training with pliable objects, and very limited experience with wire. Such skill at turning a found object into a tool is rare among animals. Chimpanzees presented with a similar task—using a length of pipe

to pass through a hole to retrieve an apple—failed until they were coached.
Since 1990 Japanese crows have been observed using cars to crack walnuts. The trees grow beside a street on a university campus. The bird drop the nut into traffic and when it’s cracked, fly down to retrieve the meat. Because traffic can be heavy on campus, the retrieval can be challenging. So the crows have learned to drop the nuts onto crosswalks. Crows and humans line up and wait on the sidewalk. When the cars stop, the bird hops into the street and safely retrieves the snack. Crows in California have been seen using the crosswalk technique. The birds have long known how to drop clams onto rocks to break their shells. But this behavior requires inferential thinking: if I drop this nut here, it will be cracked open by the passing cars.
Crows also demonstrate compassion and companionship. Kevin McGowan, working with the Cornell Ornithological Laboratory, has studied crows for over twenty years. The group he has tagged and studied suffered an epidemic of West Nile

virus that killed one-third of the population in 2002; the following year, another third were lost to the virus. Crows are very social. They roost in murders that can range from one-hundred individuals to millions. Crows have twenty-five calls. The call for distress brings other crows. Crows develop a complex system of helpers. They will defend unrelated crows. One crow will wait in a tree watching out for predators while others forage, making a small personal sacrifice for the good of the flock. Crows in the wild live fifteen to twenty years. They mate for life.
During the West Nile epidemic, when one crow lost a partner it stayed with the larger family of eight or so birds. Widowed adults moved in with their parents. Even with plenty of open territory in which to go off and mate anew, they chose to stay and care for siblings. When only two sisters were left, they joined neighbors and helped raise their young. Researcher Anne Clark reported that the crows that had suffered big losses to their community did not move right away into the opened territory. It was as if they

didn’t know who owned it anymore or they simply didn’t want to go back to the place of so much dying. She called it the “haunted house” effect.
During the epidemic, when a crow was sick and dying its mate would sit beside it until the end. If the dying bird had no mate, another member of its blended family would perch by its side. The researchers concluded that no crow dies alone. Far from being murderers, a flock crows might more aptly be called a caretaking of crows.

“Crow” from Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit by Alison Hawthorne Deming (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org.

Alison Hawthorne Deming‘s most recent book is Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed, 2014). She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson and Grand Manan, New Brunswick.

Are You Really My Friends?

Written by Alecia Sudmeyer June 12, 2014 Photography Visual Art

Are You Really My Friends?

On New Year’s Eve of 2010, I found myself sitting at my kitchen table, simultaneously writing a letter in pencil to a friend deployed in Afghanistan and instant messaging on Facebook with a friend making a film in Jakarta. I woke up in 2011 thinking a lot about friendship and relationships as well as how we communicate with one another in the 21st century. on one hand, the letter has a tangibility that makes it seem more genuine and real; on the other hand, social networks provide an immediate way to be part of people’s lives all over the world.

For the next couple of months, I started to analyze my use of Facebook and the “friends” I had accumulated in this online world. What I found were some people I hadn’t met in person, a few people I was no longer speaking to in “real life,” ex-lovers with new partners, ex-partners of friends, art dealers, curators and high school friends who I hadn’t seen in over 20 years.

I began to wonder: am I really friends with all these people?

In February of that same year, I set out to find the answer using the only tool I know: photography. I decided to visit every one of my Facebook “friends” in their homes and make their formal portrait. To find the time and money for the project, I quit one of my jobs, started writing grants, and crowd fundraising. Not long after, “Are you really my friend? The Facebook Portrait Project” was born.

In the last eight months, I have raised almost $20,000, completed over 100 portraits, photographed 163 Facebook “friends,” visited eleven states across the country and nearly fifty cities and towns. I have traveled by plane, train, subway, bus, car, bike, and on foot.

I continue to be surprised by the number of people—especially (the real life) total strangers—who have opened their homes to me: sharing their lives, their stories, their food, their gardens, and their families while allowing my camera to document it. What started out as a personal documentary on friendship and environmental portraiture has turned into an exploration of American culture, relationships, generosity & compassion, family structure, community building, story telling, meal sharing, technology & travel in the 21st century, social networking, memory, and the history of the portrait.

When embarking upon this project, I made a conscious decision to travel lightly and unobtrusively with only two cameras (a digital point & shoot and a film version) and a tripod. I also committed to shooting in each friend’s home with only available light. once I’ve taken a portrait, I then process the film, scan it, and put it online as quickly as I can. along the way, I have crawled on kitchen floors, played Legos and read books with children I just met, admired chickens and prize roosters, shared a bowl of gumbo in New orleans (with a friend I hadn’t met in real life), toured the West Wing, and listened to stories of family tragedy and strength. I have also learned how people live and create home.

One could argue that family portraits are cultural artifacts, telling a story about the lives of their subjects. I am taking that one step further by making the portraits in their homes, exploring the intimacy of an environment that also tells a story.

The art of portraiture has its roots in aristocracy. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, commissioning an artist to create a portrait was an expensive, time-consuming, and formal process. This luxury therefore became symbolic of power and wealth. However, by the mid-19th century, technological advances made cameras more widely affordable, and with that, family portraits became a part of everyday life for many people. As it did, the formality of the portrait decreased. With the ease of camera phones and the evolution of photography, the portrait has become more widespread and increasingly casual.

Tanja Hollander was born in St. Louis, MO in 1972 and returned to the state after receiving a B.A. in photography, film, and feminist studies in 1994 from Hampshire College. Her work has been exhibited nationally at galleries in New York City and Boston and has twice been selected for the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, winning a purchase prize in 2007. She has also exhibited at the Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; Whitney Art Works in Portland, Maine; and Jim Kempner Fine Art in NYC. In 1994 Hollander opened and directed Dead Space Gallery, Portland’s first art venue for local art, music, spoken word, and performance. Hollander founded and became the volunteer director of the Bakery Photographic Collective in 2001, a nonprofit member based darkroom facility in Westbrook, Maine. In 2009, she was nominated and chosen for a month long residency at the La Napoule art foundation in La Napoule, France. Hollander is represented by Carroll and Sons in Boston, Massachusetts and Jim Kempner in New York City. She is a resident of Auburn, Maine.

Featured Artist: Christine Collins

Written by Alecia Sudmeyer June 5, 2014 Visual Art

The Keepers

In the series “The Keepers” I am photographing people who are keeping beehives in suburban environments. Once limited to more rural areas, the practice of beekeeping participates in our fantasies about a suburban utopia, where we attempt to achieve both a pastoral and domestic landscape. Beekeeping speaks to our desire to “hold” nature in the face of an increasingly disconnected culture. I see these people as facilitators, and I think about how the small action of placing a hive in a backyard has broad implications about our desire for an interconnectedness with nature. There is a kind of magic in beekeeping; it is a practice that requires patience and faith. I am making pictures that suggest ceremony, ritual, and mystery of survival.

About the Artist
Christine Collins is a photographer, living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. Collins received a BA in English Literature from Skidmore College, and a MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Recent exhibits include Fellows’ Biennial, St. Botolph Club, Boston, MA; Forces at Work, University of Texas, Austin, TX; Flash Forward Festival, Boston, MA; The Easiest Season, Rayko Gallery, CA; Mentor: 40 Years/40 Photographers, Maine Center for Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; Exposure 2013, The Photographic Resource Center, MA; and The Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Town and Country Magazine, Esquire Magazine, and Adbusters Magazine. She was recently a Critical Mass Finalist, nominated for the Prix Pictet, and selected as one of the Review Santa Fe100. Her work is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery, NY, and she is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Lesley University College of Art & Design in Cambridge, MA.