Signal Songs
four channel video installation
Made in residence at Tides Institute & Museum of Art, Eastport, ME
2022
Signal Songs is a site-specific multidisciplinary project made in Eastport, Maine. Eastport and the surrounding area of the Passamaquoddy Bay were historically sites of border disputes between the US and Canada. This, in addition to the extreme ocean tides and currents, impart a sense of porousness and fluidity, an important theme in our work. Signal Songs uses poetry, video, sculpture, and performance to make connections between the region's complicated history, its local lore, and universally felt themes of separation, absence, failed communication, and the desire to breach the boundaries between us.
In order to process the influx of influences and connections we felt in Eastport, we turned to collaborative poetry as a practice of distillation. Trading authorship back and forth between ourselves, and between ourselves and the community, we built a collection of two and four line poems (images below).
As part of our multifaceted exploration of the material, we visualized a selection of the Signal Songs poems by collaging together historical photographs from the TIMA collection, monotyped words, gestures in the landscape, sculptural props, and archival footage, animating them in digital space. The final animations and poems were installed in the North Church Project Space, the oldest church in Eastport, which was acquired and restored by the Tides Institute (images above).
Signal Songs: Community Window Poetry
public interactive installation
Made in residence at Tides Institute & Museum of Art, Eastport, ME
2022
As a method of writing collaboratively with the community of Eastport, we asked passersby to arrange and rearrange words on a set of clotheslines in the window of StudioWorks. All words were sourced from archival newspaper articles and interviews about the area and then monotype printed on paper. A sampling of the resulting collaborative poetry about Eastport and its lore is featured in the Signal Songs zine and videos. The installation was active from July 10th to July 22nd 2022.