coastlinesresidency-blog - Tumblr blog

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

From Ashwin Naidu, our most recent resident. Ashwin’s a UA graduate researcher + wild cat conservationist, wildlife biologist, conservation science communicator, photographer.

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

Vocabulary Test

The opposite of ocean is ___________. "There's so little water here," she said, a lawn stretching away outside the window. Creeks and runs threaded through central Pennsylvania like veins. Rain fell often, a light mist or steady shower. The ocean is made of ____________. In Tucson, storms come from the south, the systems blooming above the Pacific. Dust, then the crush of rain, then the sweet spread of creosote scent afterward. More salt, I think, tasting the early morning light on the mountain range, dreaming of a storm I hope will reach us by afternoon. Once, I climbed out of the Sea of Cortez and stood under a public shower's spray, washing away the salt before it became my second skin. Cool and soft, I'd say about that saltless water. I had let the waves pummel me, pushing me down until sand scraped my back. The ocean is closest to ____________. She meant the lack of lakes and ponds, of water pooling rather than rushing through. Tucson's washes are all dry as I turn south and think of climbing the peak. I've heard that you can see the sea from the top, a silver thread on the horizon if the day is dry and clear.

Julie Swarstad Johnson

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

undefined

Video by Jullian Woods, one of Coast Lines’ very talented video artists:

Jullian Woods was born and raised in St. Louis Missouri and joined the United States Navy shortly after high school. While stationed in Japan he befriended a number of artists and gallerists involved in Tokyo's independent art scene. Inspired by the myriad of cultures that he encountered during port visits he bought a camera and a photography textbook and began documenting his travels and taking portraits of his shipmates. After completing his military service he used the G.I. Bill to study photography at Columbia College in Chicago. He currently lives in Brooklyn and works as a merchant sailor and photographer.

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

The artist-in-residence desk at Coast Lines. 

Sign up for your 1-hour slot.

Photo by Meredith Drum.

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

Artists Gabby Miller, Maya Weeks, and Meredith Drum present at the Coast Lines Artist Salon & Reading.

Photos by Meredith Drum.

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

ISLAND

On the island when I lie in bed unable to sleep, I listen to the lapping of small waves, giving a tempo to the night as comforting as if a heart lay sleeping next to my heart.  When storms rile up the bay, the sound turns to a roar. Water does not calm; it slams and pounds. I lie awake and wonder what will be taken this time by its force. Another black spruce, another three feet of cobbled shore. I wonder what will be left on the stony beach. Fishermen’s twine, water bottle, lobster buoy, timber splintered off a vessel that rammed into Farmer’s Ledge. Battered urchins, their purple spines askew, the dome cavities emptied out by a gull or maybe the tinier lives that feed on death and keep the sea clean.

I can spend hours watching the fog. It may come in billows or banks or wisps or clouds. It envelops the trees. The crows perch on a tall tamarack snag. They caw and caw. I caw back, hoping they will talk to me. But I am of no interest to them. Fog is of some interest. Bald eagle is of some interest. One crow makes a mock assault on the eagle as it glides toward its perch on sea’s edge. The other crows laugh. The eagle flips them off with cadenced chittering.

I refuse to stop staring at the sea. Its texture one day will be glass. The next day it will be a fine small weave, like herringbone tweed. The next day it will kick up white spires like the meringue peaks on a pie. The next day the great swells will rise as if some sea monster is about to breach. Some days the fog is so thick and grey that it is hard to see where the ocean ends and the sky begins. Somedays the sky is so azure clear, I swear I can see Earth’s curvature on the horizon. But it is the moon that speaks most clearly to sea, pulling and pushing it, and laying down its highway of white light on the black surface.

No news. Harbor seal staring at me as it swims parallel to shore. Waves recede, clatter the stones. Waves advance muffling the sound.  Out there in the far water all is still, a cadence anyway that reports a certain story every single day. I cannot take my eyes from it.

ALISON DEMING

March 3

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

Writers reading work about the ocean for the Coast Lines exhibit in the University of Arizona Museum of Art.

from top to bottom / left to right:  Raquel Gutiérrez,  María Isabel Alvarez,  Thomas Dai,  Jennifer Conlon,  Eshani Surya,  Ernesto L. Abeytia, Gabriel Palacios

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

WHAT

Coast Lines: An Artist Salon & Reading

WHEN

8-10pm, Thursday, March 2, 2017 

WHERE

University of Arizona Museum of Art, Main Gallery

FREE ADMISSION

How do you map your way to the ocean? How might we better understand and respond to the messy webs of environmental, economic, and cultural lifeways traveling its currents? As part of UAMA’s Coast Lines exhibit, three visiting artists whose work engages the ocean and questions of environmental and economic justice and aesthetic practice will offer some suggestions. After the artists’ talks, stick around to hear writers from the Creative Writing MFA programs at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University read ocean-themed work.

About Coast Lines:

The Coast Lines art exhibit experiments with ways of mapping the distances to the coast. Landlocked Tucson can make the ocean seem far away indeed. But these distances—geographic, environmental, political, economic, cultural, psychological, or spiritual—can be shortened by immersive and interactive experiences of art. The ocean, after all, is vast and planetary, its effects on human life nearer than we often think: absorbing our carbon outputs and trash, regulating climate, moving the majority of the world’s commerce, and housing an estimated million species of plants and animals.

Artists & Writers

Artists

Gabby Miller is an artist from The Bay Area. She has lived and worked out of Vietnam, the birthplace of her mother, and The Bay Area, where she was born and raised. Often using personal objects and her body in her work, she is inventing a visual language through experiments merging sculpture, photography, performance and video to describe how we transport our habit patterns, history and iconic signifiers of identity across cultural boundaries in an age of globalization.

Maya Weeks is a writer and artist from the rural central coast of California working on interactions between humans and the environment. Focuses include ocean ecosystems, climate change, gendered violence, and logistics. Maya is currently at work on a book about cultural imaginaries of trash in the ocean, examining marine debris as a form of capital accumulation. 

Meredith Drum creates videos and animations as single-screen shorts and multi-screen installations; in addition to her solo work she often collaborates with other visual artists as well as dancers, architects, writers, urban planners, computer programmers and scientists on location-based public projects, movement research, augmented reality apps and books.  Her work has been supported by grants and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, iLand, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Paths to Pier 42, the Wassaic Project, the Experimental Television Center, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, ISSUE Project Room, HASTAC and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Intermedia at Arizona State University.

Writers

Ernesto L. Abeytia is a Spanish-American poet and MFA candidate at Arizona State University. He received his Master of Arts in English from Saint Louis University and his Master of Arts in Anglo/North-American Cultural and Literary Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is currently working on a collection of poems that explore diaspora and displacement in Spain. Ernesto can be found reading some of his work online at PBS NewsHour.

Born in Guatemala and raised in Arizona, María Isabel Alvarez is currently an MFA candidate at Arizona State University. Her writing was awarded first prize in the Blue Earth Review Flash Fiction Contest and has been published in Black Warrior Review, Sonora Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. 

Jennifer Conlon is from North Carolina and is currently a poetry candidate in the MFA program at ASU where she teaches and serves as the First Looks Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her poems have been published by or are forthcoming in Four Chambers Press, Hiedra Magazine, Collateral and Bennington Review.

Thomas Dai is a Creative Nonfiction writer from Tennessee who enjoys summering in beachside cities such as Destin, Florida and Hilton Head, South Carolina: the tackier, the better. His MFA thesis is a series of essays loosely about traveling and motion, but also fashion, insects, and family.  

Raquel Gutiérrez is a poet and essayist pursuing her MFA degree in poetry at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she writes about space and institutionality and neoliberal lovers and publishes chapbooks by queers of color with the tiny press Econo Textual Objects, established in 2014. Her work has found homes in Huizache, The Portland Review, Los Angeles Weekly, GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly and Entropy. Her skin regimen includes copious amounts of coconut oil, crystal energies and bathing in the blood of basic bitches.

Gabriel Palacios is a poet from Tucson, Arizona who writes about the Pimería Alta from the 18th century to the present.

Eshani Surya is a fiction writer from Connecticut. Prior to moving to Tucson, she was living in New York and working in publishing.

Supported by grants from:

Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry

Institute of the Environment

UA English Department

UA English Objects Research Cluster

Photo by @queenfettuccine​ on Instagram

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

[untitled]

1. The boundary between the ocean and the sky is what you remember as you leave. On a plane. At that height you are seeing more than a human should. This seems like a way to say goodbye. 

2. On a full-moon night, shingles on the roofs of older Japanese houses glitter white, like wave tops. The effect on a night when the power has gone out is particularly heart-stopping. On a night like that, the ocean rests calmly on top of the town, breathing at you.

3. There’s a remarkable photo of a house carried off whole by the 2011 tsunami, floating on a crinkled sparkling sea in the sunlight. The photo either edits out the coast, or the house is in the middle of the vast Pacific. Either way, it is not floating now.

4. I visited last year for the first time in a decade. My friend sat at her kitchen table, with her family, and told me about it. The power out for days, schools closed down. Some shut permanently after 3/11, she says, and we all nod, and the youngest nephew squirms. After that, they told the oldest nephew to practice English conversation with me: How are you?

5. That night I discovered that my friend had spread a futon underneath the kitchen table, so that I could sleep in her room by myself.

6. Later, we walked down to the bay. It was a Saturday, and a group of kids from a local dojo were warming up on the beach.

7. Then they lit a fire.

8. One by one, they ran into the January surf and starting throwing punches at the horizon. Even though we knew what the fire was for--for after--we walked away from them. We couldn’t bear to look, they looked so cold. 

--Sarah Kortemeier

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

Ceramic container ship, from artist Gabby Miller, who shot the basketball footage at Coast Lines. Gabby will be here to speak on the 2nd in the Coast Lines exhibit space. 8pm-10pm: join us and learn more about her smart work on the politics of global trade logistics!

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

This is a test run

Or, we might say, a maiden voyage. But those are never tests. They’re the real thing. On the water and moving right along...to where? “Let people answer this,” Tumblr says. Well, alright then.

[coastlinesresidency-blog]

“Coast Lines” | University of Arizona Museum of Art

A collection of writings from the residents of “Coast Lines,” an interdisciplinary art exhibit running February-April 2017, at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA).

Sign up for a one-hour residency.