below is the phone conversation that inspired the title of the exhibition, as well as some context and commentary on the pieces!
this piece is a nod to the poem and performance art piece ‘My Dreams, My Works Must Wait Till After Hell’, by Simone Leigh and Chitra Ganesh —>
”what’s the yarrow about?”
fair. yarrow is a coagulate. you can drink it to sweat out an fever.
you can crush it and pack it into a wound to stop the bleeding. it’s a very healing plant. so i felt it apt to include something healing growing out of the rubble, like hope of sorts.
so many musical inspirations here. i drew reference from Tinashe’s pose on her album cover ”333” - love it hands down. i was down in the damned dumps when i finished this piece. i started it in the spring, and finally finished it in late september to make the tears more apparent. it wasn’t sad, it didn’t have butterflies, just a girl and her rock. i think it just needed some sadness to finally come thru - it be like that sometimes. i wanted to incorporate the butterflies that visit us every height of summer, but i also wanted this piece to be sad, cuz i was sad! they visited my neck of the woods during a time of great dissonance for me - i was in a lot of emotional pain and anxiety, but i also wanted to be hopeful. i had a butterfly visit me up at murphy dome with a friend while we were blueberry picking. this was right after my beloved pet passed, and i remember how bittersweet that felt. butterflies are believed to be messengers of the spirits of our loved ones, so i hope that was her trying to reach out and help me feel better. so i tried to incorporate ALL of that, lol. also inspired by this song for the title. it’s a cool song too.
this pose should actually look familiar to art nouveau nerds - i drew heavy inspiration from Alphonse Muncha’s “The Flowers: Iris” for the reference.
i had a dream like this - i was naked in the middle of tundra, and i could hear and smell and feel the heat of a forest fire, but I couldn’t see it yet around me. But I was sounded by bushes and fireweed. So I gathered a whole bunch of fireweed into a dress for protection, and it kinda looked like the May Flower Queen dress from the movie ‘Midsommer’. And once I was done, I walked thru the fire, then I woke up. No idea what it meant, but it was excellent inspiration. 🤷🏿♀️
diltiazem is a calcium channel blocker that can help with tachycardia and lowering blood pressure. i made this piece when i got my most recent diagnosis because i was suuuuper afraid and overwhelmed to take it. it was like, am i going to have to take these little blue pills for the rest of my life just to get some relief? maybe. but after a bit and good convincing, i tried to think about another way to look at these little blue pills in a good way - cute little forget-me-nots. so that’s what this piece is about - connecting this disdain and support meds can give you.
this one’s about seasonal allergies! they ain’t fun ~
fairbanksians will hopefully get the many landmark references here, but for others - this is about our local air quality, pollution, and how more folks are coming down with respiratory illnesses because of it. i mixed in the uaf coal exhaust pipe and the 3rd time burned up college inn. the iris in a lot of cultural and historic context represents wisdom or a way to signal you had a message for someone. the plant can also be used in teas to help calm and clear the sinuses, among a lot of other uses.
i struggled with the name of this one. i was trying to connect insomnia and the salmon crashes in sort of like a dream context - like a living nightmare of the salmon going away and not being able to get any rest. not a lot of words came to me, so a friend suggested for me to focus on how the insomnia and the salmon crises felt instead. and then it clicked!
