Emma Kates-Shaw for The Harvest

MAKERS OF DEATH: REFLECTIONS ON THE VEIL & THE HARVEST
A TWO-PART SERIES

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When death is no longer feared, it is held in the hands like a rock; its power suspended. Silt and debris pack themselves tightly into a smooth egg, holding the histories of past lives. Rather than turning from it, as many of us have been taught to do, The Veil and The Harvest invited us to look into molded histories contained within the inanimate which give both life, and therefore death, to objects.

In developing the first part of the series, The Veil, I connected with artists whose work rendered unique languages in which the veil between life and death— the delicate membrane between this world and the other— is seen and touched. For its follow up, The Harvest, I invited an energy worker, a printmaker and baker, a performance artist, and a musician; endeavoring to create a space where the veil between worlds was not only seen and touched, but felt. 

In order to exist in both life and death (and therefore to both sense and feel it) you have to do so in a vessel— a body endowed with the gift of mortality. If we center the narrative that works of art exist as a creation of a language, as well as a body, then we can see how each contributor to this series produced a life (and therefore death) with their work. Some artists did so by rendering a body, others by crafting a narrative with their body.

Click here to read part 1 & click here to read part 2! 

ESSAYS

AUTONOMOUS ENTITIES

​Sharon Arnold considers the ambulatory and fortified nature of architectural forms in drypoint and collage created by printmaker Kim Van Someren.

BETWEEN REALITY & THE CONSTRUCTED WORLD

Guest curator Sequoia Day O'Connell's essay for The Veil, a tender contemplative offering to the shadow self, and the shadow world.

LUNAR EKPHRASIS

Negarra A. Kudumu concludes her three-month curatorial residency with an ekphrasic response to the work of Mike Wagner.