Welcome Dawn Roe to Lamplight’s Residency at 821!

Extending from the collective reading performed as a closing event for Dawn Roe’s exhibition, Super | Natural, at Tracey Morgan Gallery earlier this year, the artist’s residency at Lamplight will serve as an incubator for the newly forming body, Hydrofeminist Action Generator (H.A.G.). Deeply informed by the sharing communities generated through the ongoing work of environmental humanities researcher, Dr. Astrida Neimanis, projects and events will engage with Astrida’s description of hydrofeminism as “an action concept” that begins with “[u]nderstanding our own human bodies as bodies of water, [inviting] us into a different kind of relation to other bodies of water, and a feminism of relation. Hydrofeminism asks: if we are all bodies of water, what does this connect us to? What can we give, and what do we owe?”

The public programs associated with the artist’s residency will engage these questions through a site-responsive community workshop held along the waters flowing through Rhododendron Creek in West Asheville Park scheduled for May 29th. Part of an ongoing series of Marking Time With(in) the Water workshops, this action will offer space for neighbors to come into relation with their freshwater spaces, combining careful observation with a collective artmaking process recording imprints of land, water, and human interactions over prolonged moments in time. Copies of each print will become part of a collective archive of our “hydrocommons” – a term used by Astrida Neimanis to describe the space where embodied human-water relations occur. A closing event on June 6th will bring together families, friends, and neighbors to celebrate, think, and share together while viewing, reading, and listening to our watery selves and fellow more-than-human beings. A library, screening environment, print sharing corner, and conversation hub will be available to gather within throughout the day.

Hydrofeminist Action Generator (H.A.G.) reclaims the hag as her revered self, honored as a conduit between the powers held within the murky darkness of turbulent forms, and the regenerative powers of gathering, rest, and resistance.

Save the Date for Dawn’s community events:

Friday, May 29th | 1-4PM
Marking Time With(in) the Water workshop
Rhododendron Creek in West Asheville Park

Saturday, June 6th | 1-7PM
Closing Event
at Lamplight’s Residency at 821

Artist Statement:

Using reproductive methods as observational tools, I respond to sites and situations where human and more-than-human lives entangle, often drawing on grief and despair as generative modes of being. Energized by continuous, impossible attempts to form a collective archive of earth, plant, and animal forms living and dying together across both great and small distances, I visualize the cohabitation of species as a collective endeavor through re-presentation(s) of both routine and remarkable encounters. With attention focused toward magical transformations occurring along and within the liminal space(s) of water-based worlds permanently re-shaped by extractive actions and colonial forms of “species management,” I push against hierarchical perspectives of the human body as dominant by seeking ways to serve as a conduit for the many Beings gestating within and along these waters as they endure ongoing disruptions, forever altering how these spaces have and continue to function as home, and community. My process incorporates analog and digital imaging, film, and video alongside camera-less photographic methods relying on direct contact with physical materials, allowing for prolonged engagement. These observations become re-presentations, transformed and replicated as sequential and composite screen and print-based forms, stressing the fragmentary nature of perceptual response. As we struggle to orient ourselves within a shared global space that is rapidly transforming, I find uneasy comfort in visualizing our lived and perceived world as one of repeated disappearance and return.