ON A.I.R. - Conversations with Artists in Residence

A conversation between legendary composer and sound-gatherer Stuart Dempster, and artist Tonya Lockyer, celebrating the Cistern at Fort Worden State Park and its part in Deep Listening and new music development. 

“Our conversation is about deep listening and creative friendships and lost sounds, the intricacies of harmony and reverberation, how parks should protect their sounds as much as they protect their fauna, and what it's like to create seminal moments in music. We travel from the streetcars of San Francisco to Carnegie Hall, but it begins right here at Centrum in the sonic depths under Fort Worden, in the Cistern.” – Tonya Lockyer 

Hosted by Tonya Lockyer

Produced by Tonya Lockyer and BC Campbell 

Engineered and mixed by BC Campbell 

Recorded: Summer 2023

Length: 55 minutes

Special thanks to Centrum, Michelle Hagewood, Renko Dempster, Shin Yu Pai. 

Mentioned in the Podcast 

* indicates recorded in the Centrum Cistern

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann

Pauline Oliveros Official Website 

“7-Up” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band* 

“Lear” from Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis*

“Trog Arena” from Troglodyte’s Delight by The Deep Listening Band

Courtesy of The Pauline Oliveros Trust and The Ministry of Maåt. Members ASCAP (PoPandMoM.org)

“Balloon Payment” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band* 

“Melodic Communion” from Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel by Stuart Dempster*

“In C” by Terry Riley

“Standing Waves” from In The Great Abbey Of Clement VI by Stuart Dempster

Overlaps and kinship abound in this nourishing conversation between Christi Krug and Alyssa Graybeal, whose respective careers in writing, memoir, and coaching yields a generous conversation full of juicy advice and heart.

Alyssa Graybeal

Alyssa Graybeal (she/her) is a queer writer and cartoonist whose work explores chronic illness and disability. In particular, she is fascinated by questions of creativity and entrepreneurship, and how navigating the world in a disabled body increases creative capacity. Her first memoir, Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World, explores the emotional landscape of connective tissue disorders Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan syndromes. This book won the 2020 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award and will be released in spring 2023. She lives in Astoria, Oregon.

 Christi Krug

Christi Krug (she/her) experienced invisibility as a child in foster care, and today helps writers of all ages to feel seen. In poetry, memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction, she honors the inner human experience. She blends modalities as a poet, presenter, visual artist, outdoor enthusiast, and yoga teacher, and is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. A Pushcart nominee for poetry, she has performed in vineyards, libraries, ballrooms, Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater, Waterstone Gallery, and Yosemite National Park. She served as Creative Resident for North Cascades Institute in 2019. Recent writing has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Kosmos Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Nightingale & Sparrow, Nat. Brut, Griffel, The Good Life Review, and The Sun. For 25 years, she has been teaching writers at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington and continues to do so virtually after a recent move to the Oregon Coast.

Ari Mokdad and Frank Abe discuss the poignant ways that their respective family histories have played significantly into the themes and approaches of their work. Both residents discuss their range in processes to screenwriting, poetry, and the multiple disciplines they’ve each engaged with over their careers.

Frank Abe

Frank Abe has worked to reframe the public’s understanding of the WW2 incarceration of Japanese Americans ever since helping create the first Day of Remembrance for the camps in the campaign for redress and reparations. He is co-author of a new graphic novel, “WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration” (Chin Music Press, 2021) and wrote and directed the award-winning documentary “Conscience and the Constitution” (PBS, 2000) on the largest organized resistance to the camps. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of “JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy” (University of Washington Press, 2018) and is currently co-editing a new anthology of camp literature for Penguin Classics. For his Centrum residency he will be working on a project to to bring those stories to the stage. He’s contributed to Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, and others, and is a past attendee of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. He blogs at Resisters.com.

Ari L Mokdad

Ari L Mokdad is a Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, and performance artist. She is a first-generation American and daughter of Lebanese immigrants. Ari graduated from Grand Valley State University with a BA in Dance, English, and Writing. She received an MA in English from Wayne State University and is currently completing her MFA at Warren Wilson College. Ari’s creative work coalesces around nature, identity, place, and embodiment. She is an active naturalist and maintains an apiary, greenhouse, and heirloom garden. Ari lives with her partner in Northern Michigan on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomie people, The People of the Three Fires.

Christian Vistan and Josephine Lee illuminate the threads that connect their work and the ways that materials and water serve as keystones to both of their practices. Both of these artists, one working in painting and the other in bio-materials find that they share interests in the roles of regeneration, repair, and nourishment in their work.

Josephine Lee

Informed by a lifetime of movement through the United States, Canada, and South Korea, Josephine Lee’s interdisciplinary practice addresses the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and naturalization through migration, alongside issues of ecological and racial justice within technology. Lee received an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, and is currently receiving a practice-based PhD in Contemporary Arts from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Lee has exhibited in Canada and the United States, and is a recipient of funding and awards from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Vera G. Sculpture Award, Oscar Kolin MFA Fellowship, American Craft Council, and College of Arts Association. Lee resides and works on the unceded and occupied ancestral and traditional lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Christian Vistan

Christian Vistan is an artist and curator originally from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, currently living and working in Vancouver and Delta, British Columbia on xwməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Sc̓əwaθn Məsteyəxʷ, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ territories. In their artworks, they translate embodied experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together elements and processes that involve memory, place, poetry, and abstraction. They are particularly interested in working with water as a material in painting and in personal, familial, and migrant histories. They make paintings, texts, and exhibitions, and often collaborate with other artists, writers, and curators. Their artwork and curatorial projects have been presented in galleries in Canada, US and the Philippines. They received their BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2017. With Aubin Kwon, they run dreams comma delta, a room for artist projects and exhibitions located inside Vistan’s family home in Delta, BC.

Allie Hankins and Hexe Fey compare notes on how they manage expectations for their work, follow curiosities, and conquer insecurities within their processes.

Allie Hankins

Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and maker who recently performed in a dream wherein she announced “Today I am Truit” before jumping into a pool. The next day in waking life she learned that ‘truit’ is a word used by the lucid dreaming community to mean ‘trout’. In waking life, Allie is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt, and in 2013 she co-founded Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com.

Hexe Fey

An interdisciplinary indigenous transgender digital storyteller, movement and contemporary dance student, and community harm reduction worker; Hexe Fey uses interactive fiction and nonlinear narrative along with glitch art to communicate vignettes of queer experience, migration, human, nonhuman and technology relations, and ancestral teachings. Hexe is the author of ‘Cursed Task’, an interactive fiction game about the struggle of writing artist bios.

Garland and maximiliano talk about everything from video games to ghosts alongside questions exploring self-care and what it means to slow down.

Spencer Garland

Spencer Garland is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher operating in Portland, Oregon. His practice encompasses filmmaking, video game development, and social work-all of which Garland brings his unique vision of new Black narratives to life. His greatest accomplishment is the creation of BRENDA ARTS. Named after his late mother, BRENDA is a media company that integrates the ideas of BIPOC youth into every project via their after-school programming.  BRENDA ARTS’ goal is to create an outlet for a new Black artistic expression and boost the voices of marginalized groups. BRENDA ARTS has expanded into the new media space with BRENDA LAB, an interactive web series about Black art and culture made in collaboration with the Portland Art Museum, and Quantum Phantom Basketball, a basketball adventure video game currently in development for Panic Inc.’s Playdate console.

maximiliano

mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist exploring a Black reclamation rococo multimedia mythos of themes & concepts of multiplicity & fluidity & race, blackness, pleasure, desirability, innocence, & imagination; digitally, physically, & communally. A generative practice of ideation & visualization; multimedia, embodied mythos & narratives – as changing the past, present, future. Expressed as self portrait, performance, installation, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, sound, movement, fabrique trapresties, collaboration, publications, body, objects, & choreography; to transform space; echoing frequencies into & through the viewer experiencing the ineffable, chthonic, profane & pleasurable. A varied & research based practice straddling mythologies, eschaton, cosmology, internet creations, Glitch Feminism, & Black nihilistic futures. ritual.

We’re continuing to listen in on the 2021 Emerging Artist Residents! In this episode Angelic Goldsky and Hayla Ragland talk through their intermedia practices and the ways that their backgrounds, the site of Fort Worden, and time for focus has affected their work. Listen to a special track from Angelic and gain a deep insight into the future archives that both Hayla and Angelic are creating.

This conversation is generous, worth listening to in its entirety, and full of various ways to think about transformation and from what art emerges and where it can take us.

Angelic Goldsky
Angelic Goldsky [t(he)y] is Russian-Jewish trans-gender, queer poetry-excavator and performer. They have been honored to transmute words across Turtle Island and Europe, unearthing what was once buried in silencing language. Goldsky likes to rip apart and release definitions of queerness, transness, spirituality, refuge, migration and exile. They do this through clownery, spoken word music, and performance sorcery, leading them international stages with rabbis, queer clowns, trans politicians, the United Nations, TEDx and the Vogue Theatre. They have been published in Frontier Poetry and SAD Mag among other journals, as well as work on the editorial board of the Room Magazine. They have performed embodiment work exploring radical presence at the Belkin Art Gallery’s Spill: Response and the Or Gallery’s Resurgence exhibition. Goldsky has developed programs in partnership with The Museum of Anthropology, Jewish Queer Trans Vancouver and Everybody Is In Downtown Eastside, working in community cohesion through art and media. They love creating arts space where everyone can be celebrated and honored in full spectrum. They are currently the Poet in Residence at Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, leading various community arts engagement programs for youth and the LGBTQQ2SIA+ community. Angelic has been known to hate taxidermies and love timelessness.

Hayla Ragland
Hayla Ragland is a Seattle-based intermedia artist. They received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Psychology from University of Kentucky, where they were a John R. Gaines Fellow for the Humanities. The artist’s practice is responsive to their work in social and cognitive psychology, including work at the Markey Cancer Center, the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and as a caregiver. Ragland’s artwork maintains concerns for cognition, behavior, and health, and their interventionary roles in social constructs and racialized histories. Using textile, sculpture, and photography, they constructs motifs of the unsound body, investigating the seat of the grotesque in contemporary visual culture, with respect to race, gender, ability, and mediated conceptions of worth. Ragland has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Artscape Gibraltar in Toronto Canada, and is the May 2021 resident at Oxbow, Seattle. They are the recipient of a Chinese travel grant from the Confucius Institute and a Names Fellow Award from the Photographic Center Northwest. Their most recent solo show, entitled /Sections, was on view at Shift Gallery, in Seattle, Washington in January of 2021.

For the second installment of the 2021 Centrum Emerging Artist Residency conversations Azali Ansar Muhammad and Laura Medina share processes and backgrounds behind their current projects. They talk animation, working fluidly through mediums, and leveraging these methods to navigate hard subject matters while bringing joy and play into the work. Muhammad shares about their work in recording and archiving Black birth stories and creating new forms of community and visibility for Black, queer and trans families and birthers. Medina discusses her methods for fluidly and colorfully moving through personal history and tough subject matter in order to bring forth joy and accessibility. Both Medina and Muhammad discuss so much more about community and possibilities for future archives and generations, and there is so much to glean from their perspectives.

Laura Medina

Laura Camila Medina is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her immersive installations and animated collage work are rooted in self reflection, the transformation of memory (both personal and collective), and the multiplicity of identity. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, PLANETA New York, Fuller Rosen Gallery, Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland Art Museum, and alongside the Nat Turner Project. She is a recipient of various awards and residencies including: the New Media Fellowship at Open Signal, Artist in Residence at the Living School of Art, IPRC Artists & Writers in Residence Program, ACRE Residency, and most recently the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency. She earned her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently based in Portland, OR.

Azali Ansar Muhammad

Azali Ansar El Muhammad (they/them) is a multimedia conceptual and often experimental artist based in Portland Oregon. They believe in community, accessibility and art as a social practice. Through their work they hope to connect other emerging artists with the experiences and platforms they need to grow in their own way. Ansar creates work that speaks to their own community as a Black, Latinx, Queer and Muslim human. Their work explores identity, connection and processes trauma.

In October 2021, six artists were juried into Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency and received stipends, housing, and studio space for one month at Fort Worden State Park. Artists paired up towards the end of their residencies to chat with one another about what they were working on and thinking about after weeks of being in residence.

Mel Carter and Woodrow Hunt kick off this series and chat about the ways that expectations changed because of the location and openness of the residency. They share thoughts on the history of the Fort as it relates to colonization and the ongoing stories that are unfolding and full of potential. Carter and Hunt discuss the ways that research and daily practice connect them to experiments and research into liquid spells, healing medicines, and tattoo practices specific to their cultural ancestries.

Mel Carter

Mel Carter is a Yonsei (fourth generation) Japanese American and non-binary femme based in Seattle on Coast Salish and Duwamish lands. Experiences within the Japanese diaspora, queerness, exploration in modern witchcraft, rituals, and mythology inform their art practice, working in tandem with waste reduction and environmental justice in the cultural context of the Pacific Northwest.

Dropping through actions of the everyday mundane and focusing on the inherently magical properties of domestic spheres, their work is influenced by marine ecosystems, elements from fables, and traditional Japanese imagery. With a refusal to work within a specified medium, impermanent materials for mortality like food and plants are often used combined with elements of sculpture, garments, and textiles within a performance or installation.

Woodrow Hunt

Woodrow Hunt is an artist of Klamath, Modoc and Cherokee descent. Woodrow was born and raised in Portland, OR where he is currently making work. Woodrow’s film practice is focused on documentary and experimental forms. His experimental work explores the functions and relationship between digital video and memory and the ways digital video can communicate issues related to the Native community. His film production company, Tule Films, provides video services to Tribes, Native businesses and organizations, or to projects which collaborate directly with the Native community; many of which are focused on education. His films have screened at the Portland International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and other festivals internationally including his most recent screening at MoMA DocFortnight 2021. His work has been included in the ArtForum print article “Artists’ Artists 2020,” the Boston Art Review, and Hyperallergic’s online articles about COUSIN Collective. Woodrow and his creative collaborator Olivia Camfield (Mvskoke Creek) are featured artists of COUSIN Collective.

In early 2021, Centrum hosted award-winning director, writer, and story artist, Brenda Chapman for a month-long residency. A few months later, Michelle Hagewood catches up with Chapman to revisit conversations started over that residency. Chapman reflects on the ups and downs of her long career at Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar and shares her early influences and the threads that connect to her newest projects and endeavors.

Brenda Chapman started her career as a story artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1987, where she worked on several animated films including The Little Mermaid, and the Oscar nominated Beauty and the Beast. Chapman was the story supervisor on the original The Lion King, for which she won ASIFA’s Annie Award.

She then helped launch DreamWorks Animation Studios, and co-directed the 1998 release of the Oscar winning Prince of Egypt. Chapman was the first woman to direct an animated feature for a major Hollywood studio.

Joining Pixar Animation Studios in September 2003, Chapman created, wrote and directed Brave – inspired by her relationship with her daughter - for which she was the first woman to win an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film of 2012.

Her first live-action film, Come Away, starring David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Chapman and her husband, filmmaker Kevin Lima (Enchanted, Disney’s Tarzan, A Goofy Movie), created ‘Twas Entertainment, which focuses on family entertainment.

Currently, Chapman is writing a feature script for Gutsy Animations UK, executive producing on projects for ‘Twas, as well as working on a novel, a memoir and a children’s book.