about the art
When you are born - you cry - but the whole world is overjoyed
When you die - the world cries - but you may find the great liberation
-- so the world took turns crying today, it seems, and every day --
–Tibetan Book of the Dead
This month we’re presenting My Old Friend Death, a music film by composer and sound artist Nat Evans. Woven together by ideas about the prairie ecosystem, Nat’s piece uses spoken text, video, drawings, and music to look at family history, climate change, and the role that death plays in our lives. The film features imagery from Nat’s midwest family archives, nature, and symbols of death with sound by cellist Lori Goldston and guitarist Will Hayes.
Our Mail Art for this month is created by Maria Maea. Her ancestor sculpture, The Jade, reflects on the way we create a history as a family through images, video, written and oral stories, and how the act of preserving our lives can be a strange, mysterious gift to future generations. Her sculpture includes a plaster mask, reminiscent of a death mask: “I like to think about what parts of us die off when we sit in stillness in the plaster mold for an hour or what parts of us die off when we see ourselves as an abstract body in a gallery space.” — Maria Maea
Through this art, we have the gift of time to sit and remember, to look at our histories, death, and grief—to move through it, let it wash over us, and heal.