Final ‘Open Studios’ finishes Caldera season

T. Lee Brown | Last updated Mar 22, 2019 12:0pm0

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Photo from the "Divergenc

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Alex Martinez enjoys a snowy cabin stay at Caldera where she is working on mixed-media paintings featuring acrylics, embroidery, and beading.

March artist residencies at Caldera were hampered by late-season snowfall. Still, seven artists made it to Central Oregon for their residencies. Working in film, literature, photography, and other media, they will share artwork, readings, and conversation during Open Studios this Saturday.

Back home in Oakland, California, Alex Martinez fits her studio practice around her teaching schedule. At Caldera, she can work all day.

“After breakfast in my cabin, I set out for Campbell Studio where I work ‘til sunset, stopping for lunch and dancing breaks,” she told The Nugget.

“It’s hard to describe the quiet and soft that is Caldera,” Martinez said. “The remote location, isolation, artist community and full autonomy is my ideal balance for delving into and catalyzing new work.”

She describes herself as a “first-generation queer Xicana, raised among nopales, strawberries, and canneries in Watsonville, California.” After studying fine arts at San Francisco State University, where she focused on printmaking and painting, she began working toward “inclusive arts education.”

Martinez became a teacher, focusing on students with moderate to severe disabilities. “I am dedicated to exalting people of color,” she wrote in her bio, “and the LGBTQI artists community through multi-disciplinary learning, collaboration, and education.”

At AiR Open Studios, Martinez plans to show a new series of mixed-media paintings begun during her time in Sisters Country. “Pop culture references, family portraiture and childhood ephemera are layered in bright acrylics, linocut stamping, embroidery and beading,” she said.

Also sharing work at Open Studios is writer Emily X.R. Pan, author of “The Astonishing Color of After.” Born in the Midwest to immigrant parents from Taiwan, she now lives in Brooklyn. She is a co-creator of “Foreshadow: A Serial YA Anthology” and the founding editor in chief of Bodega magazine.

Another Brooklyn-based resident is visual artist Carolyn Monastra, whose work focuses on climate change.

Seattle-based Kemi Adeyemi teaches gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington. Her book manuscript, “Making New Grounds: Black Queer Women’s Geographies of Neoliberalism,” and co-edited volume, “Queer Nightlife,” are in development.

Adeyemi wrote exhibition catalog essays for “black is a color” (Los Angeles), “Endless Flight” (Chicago), and “Impractical Weaving Suggestions” (Madison, WI). She co-curated “unstable objects” at The Alice in Seattle, and will curate a show on black texture at Ditch Projects in Eugene this year.

Julie Hammond lives in Vancouver, B.C. She describes her art as “working across performance, pedagogy, and intervention.” Encompassing theatre and public projects, her practice “activates spaces with the performative and investigates the relationship between performance and audience, spectator and place, site and story.”

Hammond’s work appears onstage, in print, and in the streets. It is supported by Vancouver New Music, On the Boards, and the Oregon Arts Commission, among others.

From Saratoga, California comes Alisa Yang, an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose practice is rooted in collage across mediums. Yang explores themes of language, cultural identity, memory, and sexualities of diasporas.

Yang’s recent film “Please Come Again” won the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival Golden Reel Award for Short Documentary. Her film “Sleeping with the Devil” took the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Best Regional Filmmaker Award.

Another artist and filmmaker, Miami-based Analise Cleopatra, joins Caldera from Portland, where she is currently working. Cleopatra describes her work as centering around “matriarchs, water and foliage,” celebrating “our connection to ancestry through trees and nature.”

Cleopatra co-curated the Portland Black Film Festival and was a featured artist in “Primary,” a Culture Series exhibition at the headquarters of creative agency Wieden+Kennedy in Portland.

Agency co-founder Dan Wieden is also the founder of Caldera. It began in 1996 as a youth camp in the woods, offering arts education and nature immersion to kids who lacked access to such opportunities.

Now Caldera encompasses summer youth camp, off-season AiR program, and a host of other youth programs reaching across a wide span of ages and demographics. Middle school students in Sisters and teens from Bend and Redmond are among those served.

AiR Open Studios is free to all, and takes place Saturday, March 23 from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. Snacks and coffee will be on-hand. Presentations begin at 1 p.m.

Caldera is located at 31500 Blue Lake Dr. Drive 16 miles west of Sisters on Highway 20, turn down SW Suttle Lake Loop and drive two miles to Caldera’s gate. Then follow signs to the Hearth Building.

Additional information is available at calderaarts.org. This will be the final AiR Open Studios of the 2019 winter season.

Beyond political labels

Photographer Carolyn Monastra fits the image of a liberal environmentalist. She lives in Brooklyn, works as a community college associate professor, takes photos of trees, and was a climate leader with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project.

But traveling and meeting people from all walks of life taught Monstra something intriguing: climate change reaches across the left and right divide.

“I actually grew up in Ohio,” Monastra says. “My mom was very liberal and my dad was more conservative.”

At age 18 she moved to New York. From fine art photography to the arresting documentary-activist style evidenced in her series “The Witness Tree,” her work earned accolades, exhibitions, and awards.

A pivotal moment came when she visited South Carolina.

“I went to photograph these trees that were ending up in the ocean,” a striking image of climate change in action.

Monastra said to a retired activist there, “Everyone here is so conservative.”

His answer taught her “a really interesting lesson, and it’s one that stuck with me. He said, ‘I don’t talk to them about climate change. I talk to them about things they love.’”

Hunting, fishing, and the land are loved by Americans of all political stripes. So is birding.

At Caldera in Sisters Country this month, Monastra is working on “Divergence of Birds” (pictured).

Several years back, she read an Audubon Society report on bird migration, which has been hugely altered by climate change.

She also read Philip K. Dick’s cyberpunk novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,”which inspired the movie “Blade Runner.” In the book’s dystopian future, “most of the animals that exist are just electric versions,” Monastra remembers.

The combination inspired her current series. To bring attention to the birds’ plight, she starts with a public-domain photograph of a real bird. She prints and cuts it out, attaching the cutout to a twig or hanging it from fishing line. Then she photographs her faked bird in the real environment where the bird would normally be living — if climate change hadn’t forced it out.

The process is Monastra’s way of “mimicking nature photography. But when people see the photography, they think ‘Something’s wrong! What’s wrong?’”

Monastra has an answer. “What’s wrong is that climate change is affecting these species. In a future world, if you want to see this bird, you’re going to have to prop up a picture in the landscape.”

She considers environmentalism a social-justice issue, disproportionately affecting people from lower socioeconomic classes, such as many of her students.

Monastra described how wealthier denizens of Miami, Florida responded to rising ocean levels and devastating hurricanes: “Okay, when the sea rises, I’ll just move.” That isn’t an option for everyone.

At Open Studios, Monastra will show works from “Divergence of Birds.” She will also show postcards made by youth in a workshop she leads this week. For more information visit

www.calderaarts.org.