Meet Me in a Year and a Day is a shadow puppet performance retelling Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Originally scheduled for Winter Solstice 2021 it will be preformed at Building Five at NW Marine Artworks. The performance includes music by Mark Orton. character and set designs by Aidan Saunders and Geoff Coupland of The Golden Thread Project and narrated by Ramiz Monsef. Written and directed by Daniel Duford.

It premiered June 21, 2022 at Building Five.

Meet Me in a Year and a Day is supported by a grant from Oregon Arts Council, Building Five and Reed College.

I seek stories that come from old growth America, to travel as Gary Snyder says in his poem “The Way West, Underground”, from Oregon all the way back to the caves of Europe “eating berries all the way”.

Stories and songs are vagrant. They travel like burrs on the pant legs of nomads. As stories journey along lines of speech in vastly different image worlds they retain the same bones but wear different flesh. This work draws inspiration through a constellation of story points: the medieval epic of Perceval and Gawain consorting with Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. In both stories it requires a realignment of myth and ritual to heal the wound of the land. Robert Bringhurst’s translations of two Haida epics by the mythtellers Ghandl and Skaay meet The Odyssey by way of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Shards of vernacular folk songs, disparate epics and stories from the edge of the forest will move through the studio.

This is archaeology and spirit conjuring.

On December 2, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown stood on a scaffold in Virginia, awaiting the drop of the gallows floor. A month and a half earlier, with the aim of instigating an insurrection that would forever eradicate the Slave Power, he had taken over the federal armory in Harpers Ferry along with a mixed-race group of radical abolitionists. For this he had been sentenced to hang. Brown stood for a full ten minutes with the hood over his head and the noose around his neck. He waited patiently as the military gathered in formation to witness his execution. He had already issued this final statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” The work in this show grows out of those ten minutes, their possibility and potential. It reaches from the deep past into the present. 

Folklore and myth seep into this telling. Stories are alive; they are promiscuous. They slip the borders. John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold is steeped in American history and storytelling. I created a series of portraits of the people around John Brown as if those people were my sitters. Behind them—outside, beyond the window—something else transpires: a reference to something older and bigger that casts light on their stories. The landscape is a necessary character in the work, and the long arc of tree time is essential to the narrative. Trees are the most patient of witnesses. Their slow perception connects stories and communities across centuries.

The work in this gallery is supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission, The MacDowell Colony, The Ford Family Foundation and The Ground Beneath Us.

John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold Part 1 is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU from October 15, 2020 to December 5, 2020 and John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold Part 2 at the Schneider Museum of Art from October 29, 2020 to December 15, 2020.

Here’s a review by David Bates from Oregon Arts Watch from the group exhibition America Likes Me at Linfield Gallery.

The medieval tombs of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless contain up to 80 small sculptural mourners. Each sculpture depicts an individual monk in various states of grief. It struck me that individual trees each have a similar sense of gesture. On my walks through the neighborhood and through Forest Park near my studio familiarity with individual trees arises over time. I could see how the twists in the thick bark of their trunks are like the folds in the robes of the monks or branches upraised arms. As we begin 2021 after a brutal pandemic year with record wildfires, the trees called to me to make these images. Trees have a much longer sense of time than we do. Like those holy, medieval mourners who attend to loss over centuries, the trees call our attention to what is being lost right now. Unlike the cold stone of the sculptures, the trees still live and call us to recognize what is being lost. We are asked to be the nurse log and turn grief into new life.

 These paintings were made specifically for Revolution Hall, once Washington High School and now a space full of music, design and food. The two journeys depicted in the murals are a national and continental transmission of ideas and stories. The first sequence takes into account the history of the entire continent. Stories and songs are revolutionary in that they are the food of a living culture. The stories we are taught in American schools leave out so many voices and histories that it stunts the health of the culture. The figures represented in these murals barely scratch the surface. Behind each image in the murals is a multiplicity of other stories and voices.

The second sequence is much more intimate and local. This region is fed (both literally and metaphorically) by the Columbia River. In these pictures I’ve allowed one or two people to be dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape.

In all the panels, The She Wolf walks through as a protector and a witness. She is the matriarchal protector of the wild. All of these stories are in each of us. They seep in the ground. They sit in this building. These stories are songs reverberating in these halls.

Here’s a video for the upcoming celebration in December 2018.

Which fissure do you plug first on a quickly crumbling sea wall? Maybe you quit the ad hoc repairs and step back and let the water wash over you. Perhaps instead of a sea wall we need boats to flow with the current. The focus maybe shouldn’t be on the sea wall at all but on the wave itself. One must consider the source– the tremulous sub-oceanic shrug of the Earth rocking the surface. That source– that tectonic shrug– ripples through our culture in this historical moment. Our society is rending at several seams from internal pressure. The cultural subduction zone manifests in many tremors– racial justice, global environmental emergency, the collapse of cultural institutions and labor unrest– all appear as insurmountable problems. Small fissures meant to be addressed individually. Another view is that all erupt from a shared human desire to break apart existing institutions that are killing us all. The images on this work comes from the subconscious of the Americas. Jaguar men, flooded borders, six-breasted snakes inhabit picture planes made physical through fired glaze and clay. The pots are meant to confuse boundaries and contexts. A platter becomes a painting and a jar the cover of a book. The stories are fragments that rise up from the flotsam of overflowing rivers and besieged shorelines. 

“The Traveler & the Housewife” follows two lovers as they part on separate adventures. The traveler is irrevocably transformed in his far-flung travels to foreign lands. He returns bearing seeds of new crops and ideas. The housewife goes deep into the mythic soil of her homeland. Their reunion fuses two into one. “The Traveler & the Housewife” is part of a larger project called “The North American Codex”, a series of narratives published on pots, comics, wall drawings and poems. 

This comic was made possible by a Project Grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon. I would like to thank Erika Leppmann of The Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University for giving me a studio for a month and mental space to conceive of and begin this work. The SOU residency was made possible by the Hallie Ford Foundation. Tracy Templeton opened the print studio to my use and was instrumental in the first run of prints. 

Ringing the Temple Bell is a performance, a workshop, a lecture series and a manifesto. The title describes a transcendent moment– the sensation of a reverberation inside your chest.

It is a three-day event first performed at Queer New York International Arts Festival in 2013. The three days reflect the cycle of creation – conception, formalization and ritualization. Its power lies in its uncategorizable nature. The three days would include the building of an earthen bread oven/kiln from local clay, lectures and a processional puppet show and feast. On a small scale I hope the piece could point to new teaching models and give participants insight into fresh ways of encountering art. Ringing the Temple Bell is designed with a basic structure and “script” but would accommodate the materials, grains and folklore of any given site. The goal is to create an experience that would transmit from individuals into the larger art world. Can such a small act transform existing institutions? Can art be transformative or is it simply a commodity? How can we break the chains of inherited categories of art making and its reception? The vibrations of the temple bell reverberate into the wider world. Ringing the Temple Bell is in-progress and open to other venues to be performed.

Ringing the Temple Bell was generously supported by an Artist Opportunity grant from Oregon Arts Commission, an Art Matters grant and the Ford Family Foundation. 

The Unfortunates was a hit play performed during the 2013 season of Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Currently it is enjoying a critically acclaimed run at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. Ramiz Monsef one of the show's creators and stars and I began collaborating on posters and comics. The posters are designed and printed by Tracy Schlapp at Cumbersome Multiples. The comic is available on this site at the shop. 

The Vexation of the Oak King was the second narrative dinner in an ongoing series. The first is the undocumented show Viable Seed done at Ripe in Portland in 2006. Vexation was designed to be performed on the Summer Solstice in conjunction with Museum of Contemporary Craft's Bowl Show. The dinner was created in collaboration with Stacey Givens chef and farmer at Side Yard Farms and sommelier Tom Champine. A series of texts were read before each course. The pots were made specifically for the dinner with each bowl acting as a panel of the entire story.

All letterpress by Tracy Schlapp at Cumbersome Multiples Press

WHEN I MOVED TO PORTLAND from New Mexico in the late 1990s, I was creating sculptural clay vessels and drawings. The vessels referenced Northwest Coast feast bowls and burial canoes, earth architecture, and geology. The surfaces looked ripped, charred, and occasionally fleshy. In New Mexico, the integration of indigenous Hispanic and European histories, not to mention the geology—striped and splendid for all to see—really changed me. I worked for a while with Jicarilla Apache potter Felipe Ortega in La Madera, digging clay and living in his adobe house with no running water or electricity. It was magical.

The shape of a ceramic vessel is a form of embodied knowledge. I started using majolica because I could create such vivid, painterly contrasts between the white glaze and rough red clay. I was also interested in its roots in Renaissance ceramics. This rich tradition grew out of a European desire for Chinese porcelain, but lacking the technical knowledge to make porcelain themselves, European artists developed opaque white glazes. My recent body of work is influenced by this history, particularly Delftware and the Dutch trade empire in America. The inherent violence and uncertainty that accompany a nation’s manifestation in the world breeds an enormous amount of self-doubt. My vessels explore the contradictory states, such as uncertainty and arrogance, that arise from this process.

I’ve created vessels for years, but certain myths and stories have sparked my desire to breathe life into them. I read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay while I was working at a residential treatment center for boys. I realized that I’d been making golems for a very long time, and that for me, they were a meditation on the relationship between strength and power. The myth of the golem became the guiding metaphor for an ongoing body of work. The many faces of masculinity are also very important to my output. What is a man? What is a hero?

Vessels, myth, the written word, and narrative are my foundations. Because of my work with comics, I learned the value of sequential imagery. I see comic cells like ceramic shards that possess a physical dimension—they can be manipulated and assembled, spatially, to enrich a narrative and connect it to other physical objects. I think this concept has been with me from my earliest days working with ceramics, and has shaped my relationship to narrative. The vessel represents the confluence of the domestic (storage jars), the temporal (the ashes of a loved one), and the eternal (ritual and ceremony).

Some of the vessels and pots I make I also use, and that’s when they come alive. The cake platePyrrhic Victory contains an image of one of General Custer’s horses; it adorns the object with a kind of stateliness. But when someone uses the plate for sticky buns or Bundt cake—then what? I want to reside in the interstices between fine art, craft, and comics, searching for ruptures and spillovers. It enlivens the whole field to let wild cultivars breed into the monoculture.

— As told to Stephanie Snyder for Artforum, April 16, 2012

The Naked Boy is a birth-of-the-nation myth. The Naked Boy is spit out of the mouth of a white whale in early spring. A group of crows give him the task of rescuing his twin sister from Ursa Major- The Great Bear. In order to achieve this, he must follow the railroad west across the continent. Forces for and against The Naked Boy converge with cataclysmic results. Under the surface of the adventure story in The Naked Boy is an allegory of North America. The Naked Boy uses the Bear Mother myth, an indigenous myth of the northern hemisphere, as a scaffold. The landscape in which The Naked Boy unfolds is an amalgam of American myth and history. The story has the logic of a dream. Incongruous historical figures and times coexist. Many of the characters are based on historical figures from Walt Whitman and Cotton Mather to Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis. The story follows the arc of a cyclical, seasonal myth. The Naked Boy makes landfall in early spring and culminates with a harvest time election.

The Naked Boy Parts 1-3 are available from Lulu Publishers. The entire graphic novel will be collected in one volume. The Naked Boy was shown as an installation of wall drawings, comic pages and sculptures at Atlanta Center For Contemporary Art in 2008. In 2011 and 2012 a series of letterpress and woodcut posters inspired by The Naked Boy appeared on telephone poles and community boards around the world. The story is the basis for an installation of wheat pasted woodcuts traveling in the exhibition We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order To Live. The show began at Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2013 and traveled to Weber State University in Ogden, Utah and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Eugene, Oregon in 2014.

Sleeping Giant is the story of twin boys born to a bear father and human mother. Their story begins in pioneer days. Their story mirrors America’s rise to power. The ageless brothers’ story unravels through American history. It begins in the wilderness past and ends in the suburban present. One brother leaves the unnamed small hometown to become a war hero and eventually a costumed vigilante known only as the Superhero. He returns later with only one arm, his best exploits behind him. The other brother dies in an accident trying to emulate his more adventurous brother and remains underground only to rise up as a giant sprouting huge trees from his body. Sleeping Giant uses the tropes of small town fiction like Our Town and Winesburg, Ohio to look at the role of the small town in American popular mythology.

Sleeping Giant had its first iteration as an installation at The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Lake Oswego, Oregon in 2006. The installation included wall drawings, large and small-scale sculpture, a two-page comic and a three dimensional “comic”. The show also includes an accompanying catalog. The second version was a dance adaptation by the choreographer Lawrence Goldhuber. The eight-dancer performance included projected drawings, a painted backdrop and live music by the band Tin Hat. Tin Hat’s Mark Orton has done the scores for the films Nebraska and The Real Dirt on Farmer John. The performance premiered at MASS MoCA in 2008 and went on to a run at The Henry Street Settlement in New York. The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, New York Press and others covered Sleeping Giant. A new installation of The Sleeping Giant was shown at Boise Art Museum as part of the exhibition Comics at the Crossroads in 2011. There is a limited edition comic to accompany the exhibition.

The Green Man of Portland tells a cross-generational story about people affected by the Green Man of Portland. The legend says that since Portland’s founding, sightings of small green archers have been reported throughout downtown. Along with the archers, a celestial stag, a phantom building and a huge tree have been spotted, time-to-time, throughout Old Portland. Whenever the archer hits someone, her vision changes. An aura of flowers grows from the heads of passersby. Suddenly a building called “The Greenwood” is visible where there was no building before. A giant tree larger than any buildings in town towers over the city. On certain nights, a great white celestial stag is spied in the skies over Portland. The Green Man’s arrows pierce the secret history of Portland. This invented legend serves as the catalyst for a series of interconnected short stories. The stories range from the earliest tribes in the Willamette Valley to contemporary Portland, Oregon. The Green Man’s arrows touch each character, changing their lives.

The first version of the story was created for an exhibition called The Green Man of B Street. The exhibition included wall drawings, small acrylic paintings and a 16-page comic. The Green Man of Portland #1 collects the first two minis as well a new short story. It is available from Lulu Publishers. Green Man of Portland is the basis of a permanent public art installation as part of Portland’s Old Town light rail extension. There are two sculptures and eight “historic” markers that occupy 10 blocks of Old Town/Chinatown.