Join us at Franconia Sculpture Park at 7:30pm on Thursday, September 12th for a magical evening of art and music, featuring a performance by More Light and projections by Franconia’s Prairie Artist-in-Residence Torey Erin. More Light is an ambient soundscape project started by Minneapolis based musicians Al Church, Don House, Lars Larson, Eamonn McLain, and Dave Simonett. The project grew out of an idea to explore sonic spaces, and is entirely improvised. New additions to the group are Torey Erin whose projections help deepen the overall atmospheric quality of the work and Sarah Elstran who is known for her beautiful use of vocal looping. Members of the band play in a multitude of projects including Derecho, the Nunnery, Trampled by Turtles, and Jack Klatt.
Prairie Artist in Residence at Franconia Sculpture Park
Torey is the inaugural Prairie Artist in Residence (2024) at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota.
Torey’s project, Andscape: Entangled Pluriverse is a rather nebulous work in progress, getting to know and forming a relationship to the land.
To know a landscape is to form an intimate relationship to it. She approaches the site with a series of questions when meeting this place, while also leaving room for being present with it and its ‘placeness’.
We are the land and the land is in us. Throughout the history of colonization and Western patriarchy in the
US, we have been disentangled from the relationship mindset and connection to the land. We (settlers) see the
landscape as something to extract from - to bulldoze over - as a site of boundless resources for western minded
human centeredness.
What happens when we get to know a place? We may be able to make better assumptions about what happens
there. What lives here, where does the water flow, how are the contours forming,
what is overbearing, what is needed, what are the impacts of humanism, and how can we best shift the lens from
human center- to a multi-species choreography for non-human life? What does a landscape of entanglement
look like?
We have entered the Anthropocene (also a human-centered term) - a new geological era in which humanity
influences every square meter of the earth’s surface and atmosphere. We have described ourselves as humans as
culture, a dichotomy and separation from ‘nature’. In thinking about our separation and extraction from nature,
we know that this dualistic approach of nature vs. culture must develop and adopt new approaches to the way
that we think about materials, design, art, urbanism, and endless growth (capitalism).
Torey’s approach to landscape is to understand the inter-subjective relationships with non-humans, the living
selves and communicative relations that they have with one another, or as Bruno Latour de-
scribes, an ‘entangled pluriverse’.
As Donna Haraway proposes, entangling ourselves involves entangling time - ‘chipping and shredding and lay-
ering like a mad gardener, (to) make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures’.
Understanding that the land is both in and outside of us - and that we are not the main characters but a theatrical
choreography, entangled with non humans and time.
This relationship development is supported by a series of conversations and workshops programmed
around art and ecology including artists who are working ‘with’ ideas of entanglements and materiality.
Her (human) collaborators include Zeni Flauta, Kim Boustad, Jessie Merriam, More Light (Al Church, Don House, Lars Larson, Eamonn McLain,Dave Simonett, Sarah Elstran), Micheal Legan, Sebastian Duncan-Portoundo, and Megan Burchette.
This project is made possible by Franconia Sculpture Park’s amazing staff.
MN Artists essay: Being in Place, Unseeing Ourselves by Torey Erin
As part of the curated series Site Specific by Mike Curran, Torey wrote about the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant in Arden Hills for the Walker Art Center online publication MNArtists.org
The contributors of this series present different versions of “something else” to direct our attention towards, with each linked by their intention of offering alternatives to the placelessness imposed by contemporary culture. In the spirit of “placefulness,” this growing collection of writings gives access to local projects and practices that refuse the estrangement brought about by our techno-driven times, helping us find our way back to each other and the histories, realities, and futures we share. - Mike Curran
Link to the essay can be found here: https://mnartists.walkerart.org/being-in-place-unseeing-ourselves
Torey Erin, Casey Deming, and Regan Golden in Conversation
Torey was invited to speak with artist Casey Deming and Regan Golden as part of Casey’s exhibition, Viewfinder at Mirrorlab in Minneapolis Minnesota. The discussion touched upon the aesthetics of the living world and how different modes of making can advocate for new perspectives around our always-changing environment. Read the full transcript here.
About Viewfinder: A collection of new work that was the culmination of a 2020 MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant. The project used four publicly accessible regions of the Twin Cities to investigate how photography affects our behavior and attitude toward the natural world: community gardens, public parks, the Mississippi riverfront, and retention ponds. A limited edition artist book was released in conjunction with the exhibition. Wayfinder chronicles the two year long project through examinations of the body in the landscape and textual explorations of the act of photography.
Salix poem winner of Twin Cities Harvest Moon poetry contest
September 10 2022 my poem Salix was performed at St Paul-Changsha China Friendship Garden for the Twin Cities Harvest Moon Festival
https://mnchinagarden.org/st-paul-changsha/
MANA MDW Fair in Chicago
Torey will have work as a part of the 4Ground Midwest Land Art Biennial in the MDW Fair
MdW, an artist-run Assembly that was dormant for 10 years, is returning in 2022 with a renewed mission to convene alternative artist platforms in Chicago.
This time, MdW has been co-designed by an expanded group of seven organizing partners from across the central midwest. And you’re invited to connect with all of us through a series of regional road trips and summer readings, culminating in the Chicago Assembly.
We’re abstaining from the competitive commercial art olympics of the Art Fair by horizontally organizing a free-to-play space for cooperation and mutual aid. Help us build a better salve to the social atomization of our time.
For more information visit: https://www.mdwfair.com/
ARTIST TALK at the Plains Art Museum
Torey will be speaking about her project Love Letters to the Earth and her artistic practice at the Plains Art Museum on Thursday, August 25 at 6pm.
Details can be found here: https://plainsart.org/events/creative-artist-talk-torey-erin/
SALIX 16mm Film upcoming screenings
SALIX has recently been featured at the Franconia Summer Film screening of environmental films June 25, 2022
Salix is a 16 mm film portait of a willow tree with music by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson (LAMAR)
https://www.franconia.org/events-programs/film-at-franconia/
Salix is currently on view in the exhibition FROM THE EARTH curated by Melanie Pankou on view until August 14, 2022
Reception: Friday, June 10, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Participatory Event with Torey Erin: Love Letters to Earth II, Thursday, August 4, 6:00 p.m.
Non-MCAD visitors must RSVP via Eventbrite
From the Earth is an exhibition that brings together eight artists who explore our intricately-connected relationship to the natural world. Their diverse practices center around the poetic use of terrene materials, interior and exterior places, and how the disengagement with our bodies is linked to the environmental crisis.
The exhibition is inspired by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy’s theory of the “The Great Turning”— described as an epochal global evolution from the industrial growth society to life sustaining civilization. Macy outlines three dimensions of “The Great Turning”: Holding Actions—activism that slows down the industrial growth society’s damage to the earth; Structural Change—replacing outdated and destructive systems with new structural alternatives; Shift in Consciousness—the development of the ecological self by cultivating awareness of our non-separateness from the world by acknowledging the earth is our larger body.
The exhibition addresses the question: What is the artist’s role in “The Great Turning?” The artist becomes a visual communicator of these dimensions of transformation by engaging the viewer’s body as a living system through the interconnectivity of materials, encountering our humanness through images of the inner and outer worlds we inhabit, and broadening our perception of time, from short-term thinking to contemplating deep, ecological time.
LOVE LETTERS TO THE EARTH: 4GROUND LAND ART BIENNIAL
Love Letters to the Earth
Join artist Torey Erin in her project for the 4Ground Biennial, "Love Letters to the Earth." Working together with Growing Together and the World Garden, participants will gather in a group discussion about their connections and understanding to the earth. You will then write a love letter or message to the earth on seed paper, and with the help of Torey plant your letter in the garden which will be nurtured and grow over the course of the summer.
Location: Rabanus Park/The World Garden; 4315 18th Ave. S., Fargo
Jun 2, 2022 | 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM Thursday
Instructor: Torey Erin
Members: $ 0.00; Non-Members $ 0.00
REGISTER HERE: https://public.plainsart.org/public/AdultPreview.faces?wrkid=1016
Five Minute Film Festival
film still from Salix
Torey’s 16 mm films, mausoleum and Salix, in collaboration with music by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson, were selected to be part of the Franconia 5 minutes Film Fest. The Franconia 5 Minute Film Fest – presenting films from artists in Minnesota and Wisconsin working in video art, film, documentary, animation, or experimental media. $5 submission and cash prizes – $500 First Place, $250 Second Place, $100 Third Place. September 11, starting at 9 pm - https://www.franconia.org/events-programs/film-at-franconia/
Jurors:
Xavier Vasquez (California) creates custom visual elements for live video mixing and projections for live music and performance events as is best known as a documentarian, emerging filmmaker, cinematic visual artist, and curator of video and music events in the San Diego/Tijuana region. Xavier is a graduate of SDSU, (BA in Environmental Design), Mesa College, (AS in Architecture) and former audio engineer and Media Production Specialist at KPBS Radio and Television. Currently he is the Owner of AxentLive, a Media Specialist at Culture Change Consultants, and a Principal at XavaZ Studio, as well as a freelance videographer.
Hassan Pitts (North Carolina) is a multi-media artist who primarily works with film, video, animation, sound and photography. He received his BFA from Kutztown University, and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Themes within his work deal with relational interaction played out in society at large. Hassan regularly collaborates and exhibits with artist Jennida Chase under the moniker of s/n. They have been successfully making large quantities of works for the past 12 years, including short films, video art, site-specific installations, city-wide interventions, multi-platform projects, and printed works which they’ve screened and exhibited internationally. Hassan was the Executive Director of Big Muddy Film Festival from 2015-2019. He currently teaches in the Department of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro
Jason Eppink (New York) is an American curator, designer, and prankster. His projects emphasize participation, mischief, surprise, wonder, generosity, transgression, free culture, and anti-consumerism, and they are staged in public spaces and online as street art, urban interventions, and playful online services and hoaxes. Eppink serves as Curator of Digital Media at Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. His work at the museum revolves around participation in a variety of fields, including video games, interactive art, remix, animated GIFs, and online communities.
Ginger Shulick Porcella (Minnesota) currently serves as the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Franconia Sculpture Park. She holds an M.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and a B.A. in Art History from DePaul University. She was previously the Executive Director and Chief Curator of MOCA Tucson, Executive Director of the San Diego Art Institute, and the Executive Director of Art Connects New York. She has curated critically acclaimed exhibitions such as: Cyclic with Cassils and Ron Athey; Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality and the Occult in Contemporary Art; Dazzled: OMD, Memphis Design and Beyond; and Amir Fallah: Scatter my Ashes on Foreign on Lands. She is currently developing Kenny Scharf’s first touring retrospective and catalogue raisonné and is the Director of the forthcoming 4Ground: Midwest Land Art Biennial taking place across 4 states and tribal lands. She is the founder and head curator of LUMEN video and performance festival in New York as well as the 5 Minute Film Festival in San Diego and Tucson. Her exhibitions have been positively reviewed in Frieze, The New York Times, and Hyperallergic, and in 2015 she was named the “Voice of the Year” by The Voice of San Diego.
Ellen Mueller (Minnesota) (she/her/hers) has exhibited nationally and internationally as an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues related to the environment and capitalism as it affects daily life. She received her MFA from University of South Florida, and has authored several art and design textbooks.
MAY.03.2020
*from the zine, Since Covid, published by Peng Wu
On Sunday May 3 I had a dream I was on a very tall ladder in a large white room with high ceilings, carefully installing On Kawara's “Today series” paintings, hundreds of them, in a grid. A row of rectangular windows were close to the ceiling and the paintings were below the windows. The light had a late morning haze to it. Perfect lines, all of them a deep cadmium reddish color with the stark, white dates. OCT.27.1967. FEB.04.1985. 30.DEC.1951 and so on. I slowly went down the very tall ladder. It was thin and narrow and I focused to keep my balance. When I reached the ground I picked up an On Kawara painting, and brought it up the ladder carefully to set onto the silver nails in the wall. I leveled the painting, which seemed to be about 8x10 inches. And again, slowly went down the very tall ladder. I slid the ladder over to the right a little, and climbed back up with another date painting to hang on the next set of nails. The painting I had previously leveled suddenly tilted on the wall, the bottom left corner rising up. I went down the ladder, going a little faster, and shifted it back to the place that it had been. There was no sound in the room. All of the date paintings started to tilt, the grid disrupted, waving. I looked back at all of the labor. There was no sound in the room. They started to fall off the wall, bleeding. It was alarming, all of this precious art and labor, contorting, failing. I woke up. My heart ran races in my chest.
A beautiful panic dream. The last time I saw On Kawara work was in September at mia. One Thing was part of the exhibition “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965 - 1975”. A tryptic: the left read “ONE THING”, the center, “VIET-NAM”, and the right “1965”, relayed a message of the surrounding circumstances of the war. His painting style changed afterward, the surrounding circumstances left out, and he solely focused on the dates from then on - a solemn reflection of living and breathing another day.
Five years ago I saw his retrospective, Silence at the Guggenheim. I was invited to New York with a friend for an art fair - she went to work all day at the fair and I walked around Manhattan. At the park I had my palm read by a fortune teller; she told me in another life that I had hung myself, and that is why my mother had a difficult labor with me (she did not know, that in fact, my neck was wrapped in my umbilical cord during labor and my heart slowed. Nurses prepared my mother for a c-section. A cool doctor entered the hospital room and told everyone to calm down and wait, they watched as I untangled myself and then came into the world). I wanted to experience the inside of the museum and found myself at what seemed like a funeral procession. Visitors dressed in black, silently winding up the museum structure from date painting to date painting. I learned that Kawara would paint one date painting per day, in sans serif text meticulously executed with acrylic paint and no use of stencils. A compulsion. Some say it was a result of traumatic stress from living in Japan during and after the war. If he couldn’t finish a day’s painting by midnight, he destroyed it. He housed the finished date paintings in tailor made cardboard boxes, lined with the day's newspaper, usually the New York Times.
The dream wouldn’t leave my mind, the collapse was so vivid. I thought it could be a subconscious confrontation with the current events of the world. The collapse of the grid represented the disruption in nearly every aspect of daily life due to the pandemic. ‘Normal’ was no longer available to us, anxiety was heightened. In May I quarantined for weeks because I thought I had the virus. I had never experienced the level of fatigue. My muscles felt like stones. I couldn’t stay awake either, and slept nearly 16 hours in one day. This was prior to available citywide testing, so I did a telehealth check up, logging into my account and submitting my symptoms to ‘Lindsay’. I was in the ‘could be the flu or corona virus’ category, because I did not have respiratory symptoms. With four days of rest my strength came back. Months later, when antibodies tests were available, I tested in person at a clinic one block from my house. A man named Randy took my blood. Randy was broad shouldered with facial hair and large forearms. He wore a face shield, no mask. Randy used his breath, not his voice, to walk me through every step he would take before and after putting the needle inside of my vein. The whisper made me feel taken care of in a way I had never felt at the doctor. I went home and wrote Randy a very positive online review about his breathiness and gentle nature. It was probably unnecessary information for the clinic, but at that point person-to-person interactions were limited and non-intimate. We were all dancing spatially in public now, no brushing past or hello hugs to friends, all gaze - no smile, muffled voices behind paper masks. A whisper felt like deep cherished care.
Maybe the dream is a reflection of my own repetitive days blurring together. When the pandemic reached the US, my mornings began with tangerine tea, scrolling the coronavirus reports and maps, and running three miles around my neighborhood. I consistently ran past a woman with short blonde hair, mid-fifties, briskly walking each day. We waved at each other. She wore a black mask and sunglasses. In the summer she started to wear a baseball cap with a rearview mirror on it so she could see if someone was coming up behind her. This surprised me but I imagined she may have a preexisting condition or lives with a parent. In August she suddenly had a ponytail coming out of the cap with the rearview mirror. This also surprised me and now I even wonder if it is the same woman. Stepping on the same wheat shadows on the concrete, past the archery targets, under the train tracks, and up the hill of sumac. At first I ran to relieve anxiety and move my body a bit because I was doing a lot of sitting, working from home. Running became something to put on my calendar that I felt I could actually control. My distance increased to six miles, then nine, thirteen. Exhaling felt like the only truth.
The dream could represent the complicated visual obituary of the pandemic: seeing the interactive maps on the screen grow from orange to red day after day as the death toll rises. Bodies. Numbers. Days. I have read that when faced with a massive crisis, humans go through psychic numbness, meaning that as the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy reliably decreases. Our brains can’t fathom the millions of people dead - massive crisis becomes abstract thought. The numbness of numbers. I thought about On Kawara’s paintings in relation to this as a recording of his very existence through numbers and language anonymity. Art historians have written about the paintings as conceptual and stripped of emotion, a sort of mechanomorphic way of being, or, machine quality projected onto the human. (Kawara could have been projecting the ever increasing mechanomorphism we see today in our ever present merge with technology).
But beyond the number is the human being, steadily hand lettering the painting, living for the day. They appeared as a chronological artifact, but were actually a sign of Kawara’s life, the country he was in, the box he handmade, the newspaper he read. They all held a secret memory - something invisible. The virus has an invisibility too - captivating, unseen, unsure. We don’t know if it is here or there or if we even have it when we have it. We enter an abstract frame of mind to comprehend it. I imagine it on the surface of my mail, the door handle, the sunbutter. I used to clean every grocery item with bleach wipes. But if I am truly honest it was more about the performance of cleaning than it really was about eliminating the virus from the item. If I had been certain it was on the jar of sunbutter I would have treated it like toxic waste with tongs and a full suit on. The cleaning was to exit the feedback loop of my mind questioning whether or not the item was a potential infector.
Yet, some people don’t even believe the virus is anywhere at all; so the dream could be about the fragmentation of our reality. Kawara’s paintings represent time itself as consciousness. But somehow they are only partial truths as documents of linear time: each date, painted in a 24 hour time frame. Month, day, year. The archive of the arrow of time, the form of reality that the larger majority of human life agrees upon. The name COVID-19 is a time capsule: many think that there is a before, during, and after COVID-19 in some kind of hopeful linearity. Western culture favors the extractive, destructive mental concept of linear time which in a way ignores bodies (heartbeat, respiration, circadian rhythms, sleeping, waking) and ecosystems in favor of a time that is successive: time-is-labor-is-money. And the dream is perhaps about the disruption of our understanding of time. The teleological mistake we have made. The reality is, the earth and its microbiome is for life, and the virus reveals to us that human life is disrupting the health and ecology of animals and other life forms. So this linear system is perhaps failing, because it does not recognize that we revolve and radiate, and that our impact always affects and relates to something else in a circular way. Circular time, which is nature's motivation, is not an adopted concept of western culture because it does not appear progressive. If we redirect and realign, perhaps we can reflect on ourselves as light beings with a high consciousness in our moment of space and time - developing humility and creating equanimity with the microbiome. I thought of the cyclical while I was filming a cicada on the side of my house emerging from its nymph exoskeleton. It was pulsating, uncurling slowly. A chime of cicadas would sweep loudly as it moved, luring it out. Its wings grew, inflating with fluid. Cicadas sing and lay eggs in a tree. The eggs hatch and then they fall to the ground and suck onto a root of a tree for its sap nutrients and grow underground for 2-17 years. They need bacteria to make amino acids, so they form a relationship with fungus to survive. They emerge from the earth, shed their exoskeleton, mate, lay eggs, and die. The circle starts all over again - a magical relationship of beings. Perhaps we have found ourselves emerging from the nymph-like stage pulsing toward a new time.
I thought of Kawara’s unfinished day paintings. I imagine him trying to outpaint the clock from wherever he was, the restraint of the imaginary line of midnight. The clock moves its hand just before the last few brushstrokes and he bends his neck, pauses. Maybe he even sets a timer. In disappointment, he rips the painting. Or burns it. Or Kawara opens the window and gently throws it into the garbage behind his apartment, it spins down, the partial date blurs. And this garbage is full of these failed date paintings and eggshells and tissue. Or maybe he buried them all, in a tailor made box, complete with a newspaper and the earth and the arthropods use it for sustenance. These details are unknown. What we do know is that for Kawara, time was an emotional and imaginary relationship. Because that is what time seems to be. We give it meaning to try to understand the complexity of the system as a whole. So it is also just an appearance. Just like a painting. Just like a dream.
Hinge Artist Residency
LIGHT STUDY
The Light Study is a 5 week program designed by Minneapolis based artists Seth Dahlseid and Torey Erin, focusing on the fundamentals and importance of light. Light Study is inspired by Thomas Kirkbride’s philosophy that the mentally ill could improve with air, light, and occupational therapy. The program includes an active study about the philosophy, physics, and poetics of the phenomenon of light.
Support for this program is brought to you by the Springboard for the Arts Hinge Artist Residency Program. Special thanks to Fergus Falls public Library, Kaddatz Gallery, The Spot, and the Fergus Falls community!
The Light Library at Kaddatz Gallery Studio K
Opening Saturday, October 27th 12:00pm-3:30 pm Continuing Friday and Saturday November 2, 3 12:00pm-3:30pm November 9, 10 12:00pm - 3:30pm
Visitors are welcome to experience a collection of books on the philosophy, physics and poetics of light. The Light Library welcomes conversation and experimentation with objects that reflect and refract natural light. Special thanks to the Kaddatz Gallery and the Fergus Falls Public Library. This event is free and open to the public.
Slide Projection Installation
Saturday, October 27th 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Kaddatz Studio K
Minneapolis based artists Seth Dahlseid and Torey Erin present an installation of several 35mm slide projection images, sourced from the Minnesota Historical Society, family basements, institutional archives, and thrift stores. The slide images displayed show people engaged in everyday life, creating new narratives in an exploration of analog viewing. Visitors are welcome to bring their own 35mm slides to view. During their Hinge Artist Residency, Dahlseid and Erin are focusing on the fundamentals and importance of light. A slide projector is created by using the concepts of refraction, focal point and focal length, and observation of how light passes through lenses. These physical concepts bring us the experience of photography and the projected image. This event is free and open to the public.
Super 8 Film Screening
Saturday, November 3rd 6pm - 9pm
The Spot
Minneapolis based artists Seth Dahlseid and Torey Erin present an evening of experimental Super 8mm films by Torey Erin, Seth Dahlseid, Anna van Voorhis, Xavier Tavera, Allen Killian-Moore, Sarah Sampedro, Kevin Horn, and Alan Gerlach. These particular artists use film as a work of moving visu- al art, creating experimental perspectives on traditional formats of cinema. During their Hinge Artist Residency, Dahlseid and Erin are focusing on the fundamentals and importance of light. The Super 8mm Film Screening focuses on the ways in which moving image can be used to compose visual poetries transcribed using light, motion, and time. This is a ticket based event, payable by sliding scale between $1-$5.
Camera Obscura
Thursday, November 15th - Sunday November 18th 12:00pm - 4:00 pm
Kirkbride Regional Treatment Center
A camera obscura, is a Latin term meaning dark room, which has the ability to project the surrounding exterior landscape to the inside walls with the aid of a lens. Dahlseid and Erin present Roland, the camera obscura, a portable light tight room with a lens facing north in view of the Kirkbride tower. Visitors are welcome to step inside of the camera obscura to learn about and experience the phenomenon of light, the human eye, and the history and mechanism of the camera. This event is free and open to the public.