This last week I went on a fantastic artist residency in the Wallowas, several hours south of Portland Oregon. The group is called Signal Fire, and was started back in 2008 by Ryan Pierce, aka "Tarp Tarmac" as he is known on the trail. Most of us got trail names. Mine was MARS as my middle name is Marcelle which is greek for Mars and I am admittedly obsessed with the barren red planet.
The theme of the trip was "Year of the Wolf". Our trip leaders were Tarp and Diamond Breath (Nina Montenegro) who provided a reader geared toward orienting us to this wild and contested landscape. The trip was peppered with guest visits from Rob Klavins of Oregon Wild and George Weurthner, prolific writer and photographer on all things ecological.
We drove into the Eagle Cap Wilderness section of the Wallowas, divvied up food, packed our bags, and set out on the trail. We hiked to Eagle Meadow where we set up camp for the night. The next two days were followed by hiking further up into the mountains and setting up camp, cooking delicious dinners, playing "HOT DICE!", having discussions, and jumping into ice cold glacial lakes. The last 3 and half days, we set up a base camp to make work, relax, hike, read, or whatever else we wanted to do.
photo: Tarp Tarmac
I went on the residency with the intention of examining the experience as a manifestation of Queer Ecology. Thinking about Signal Fire as a space which dissolved boundaries between studios, artistic practice, permanence, mobility, and temporality. I left with quite an extensive reading list and an experience that frayed edges, cracked assumptions, and inspired thinking.
As part of reintegration into civilization, Tarp told us to take an mental image and hold onto that feeling from something special we remembered from the trip. This, if only temporarily, would sustain some of the wildness that we had begun to reconnect with during those 8 days. I have many, but the most poignant was an emotional moment alone in my tent. After an exhausting day of hiking, setting up tents, blowing up air mattresses, bear hangs, and the special experience of cooking dinner outdoors, I crawled into my tent and allowed myself to relax. The doors of my tents were unzipped, the breeze flowed through along with several forms of flying insects, and spiders began to make webs at the entrances. I watched ants scour my tent for a while, and I picked up my reader. I read essays about wolves and the horrific mistreatment they'd received from humans and their extirpation. How wolves have become symbols of ideology that Man has used to propagate the destructive myths of Man vs. Nature and Civilization vs. Wild. I read some hard stuff and had no where to go. No Instagram to check, to text message to send to my girl friend. I had to sit there with it and feel it out. I just cried, for myself and for the wolves.
I read about horrific things happening in the world everyday. I read about horrific things that happened hundreds of years ago, yesterday, and horrific things that are probably going to happen in the future because of humans. The trip was a slowing down. No endless streams of headlines to process as quickly as possible. Just the material in front of me and all the time in the world to absorb it. It was devastating in the best way.
photo: Crys Moore - koan #2 (hanging and draping)
Of all the things I missed from civilization, I missed having a chair the most. My back was in so much pain from the pack and all the bending over to do all the things. I became acutely aware of how addicted to comfort I am, how that dictates my relationship to my environment, and how that underpins my definitions of 'home'. To think some of this through, I created a few prosthetics for supporting my body in various positions, relieving my spine of the pressure of supporting my body and bringing me closer to that feeling of 'comfort'. I prototyped them out of found sticks and rope as that was what was available.. They functioned mostly as props for my weary body, connecting it to the landscape and rendering it subservient to this wild space that I called home for 8 days. This was a private performative experience, and therefore I have almost no documentation. As I engaged with these temporary devices, I thought a lot about a koan I'd heard recently. During a dharma talk, Eido Roshi of the Zen Studies Society told a student who had slid off their cushion and propped up against the zendo wall: "You will carry that wall on your back the rest of your life". The student resumed zazen posture immediately.
photo: Crys Moore - Queer Ecologies 1 & 2 composite
I also set out on the trip with the intention to try 3D scanning. I want to eventually recreate the experience I had using either a game engine such as Unity or piggybacking on top of Second Life. The initial sketches turned out beautiful and strange, and will make for great large scale prints.
The trip fostered an intimacy that I had never experienced - an intimacy with myself, my body, the landscape, techne (as read through Heidegger) , my inspiring camp mates, and those wolves that I would never see. That intimacy and the subsequent vulnerability is the queering that I was looking for.
Here's a slideshow of some selects:
Created with flickr slideshow.