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I’m delighted to announce the launch of a collection of short stories and photographs The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far on Coffee House Pre
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I’m delighted to announce the launch of a collection of short stories and photographs The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far on Coffee House Press – several exhibitions including Ronald Feldman Gallery (NYC), F.A.C.T. Museum (UK), a new essay in Guernica, a feature interview in Hyperallergic, the inclusion of my work in the archives at the Brooklyn Museum, the launch of my new nonprofit Contos + Wikswo, as well as a series of interviews with LitHub, Pixelated, Bowery Poetry Club, Creative Capital, and more.
NEXT WEEK the book tour begins with my live performances and video installations from the book, alongside performances by composer-musicians and signings, cocktails, and Q&As:
….in NYC on Thursday, June 11th at Howl Arts (with Q&A on Saturday, June 13th)
…in LA on Tuesday, June 23rd at Monk Space
…in SF on Thursday, June 25th at Green Apple Books on the Park
…in Brooklyn on Monday, July 6th at Greenlight Books
Click here to purchase the book!
Best Wishes,
Quintan
www.QuintanWikswo.com
www.BumbleMoth.com |
THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR // Stories and Photographs by Quintan Ana Wikswo // Coffee House Press
When love, lust, and longing have all but killed you, and Newtonian physics has become too painfully restrictive, is it possible to find freedom in another dimension? Have you lost the will to live, or have you lost the will to live as human? In these stories, characters must learn to live with unmarked edges and meanings that can no longer be defined.
Available to purchase wherever books are sold, including Coffee House Press,
Greenlight Books, Skylight Books, Green Apple Books, and Amazon.
“You will find within these pages a marvelous alchemy of image and text, all of it radiant, sensual, endlessly layered. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far is at once a seduction and an insurrection: a paean to lovers, explorers, resisters, and those without borders.”—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
“These stunning, solitary and cinematic letters to the self (think of the Quays and Béla Tarr speaking together in dreamtime) bear witness to a world beloved and betrayed, the spent and brutal collisions of irretrievable loss with what might have been possible.”—Rikki Ducornet
_“Quintan Ana Wikswo, in her unique and magnificent The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, has ignited an extraordinary condensation of texts and images that culls together spirit, compassion, and dreams. Throughout her foray into extensions of the mind and the limits of the body she exudes an uncanny power of magic and wizardry.”—Lynn Hershman Leeson _
“[The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far explores] humanity from the outside, not just crossing genres but exploding them. Quintan combines text and photography to give us characters who have left their bodies, and whose stories have become boundless. She writes with both a lightness and the weight of lives unlived, of remorse, and of loss.”—0s&1s / PIxelated |
HOPE OF FLOATING BOOK TOUR: NYC, LA, SF & BROOKLYN
The book launch tour features exhibitions of photographs from the book alongside live performances by Quintan Ana Wikswo, with video projections of Wikswo's films from the book with live performances by acclaimed composers Veronika Krausas, Arthur Kell, and Jason Francesco Heath.
Receptions, book signings, moderated discussions and Q&As include sales of the book by Skylight Books, Green Apple, and Greenlight Bookstore.
Click here for NYC Launch ...
Thursday, June 23rd / 6pm opening, performance at 7pm / Howl! Happenings / 6 East 1st St, NYC
Click Here for LA Launch ...
Tuesday, June 23rd / 7pm opening, 8pm performance / Tuesdays at Monk Space /
4414 W 2nd St, LA
Click Here for SF Launch...
Thursday, June 25th . 7:30pm performance / 8pm discussion with Maxine Chernoff / Green Apple Books on the Park / 1231 9th Ave, SF
Click Here for Brooklyn Launch >>
Monday, June 6th / discussion with Robert Repino / Greenlight Bookstore / 686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
Performances feature The Double Nautilus, about two scientists who discover a primordial fossil beneath the Hadron Particle Collider...The Kholodnaya Voina Club, about cold war test pilots who crash undersea and, while transforming into fishes, dream about finding their lovers in the afterlife...and The Anguilladae Eaters, about a half-eel, half-witch and her relationship with a Viking sailor.
The book tour is made possible by sponsors, hosts and partners including Creative Capital, the Theo Westenberger Foundation, Coffee House Press, Howl! Happening, Some Serious Business, Tuesdays at Monk Space, Skylight Books, Green Apple Books, Greenlight Bookstore, and Bowery Poetry Club. |
 (c) Quintan Ana Wikswo / THE CARTOGRAPHER'S KHOROVOD / from The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far |
INTERVIEW WITH QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO ON LITHUB: "SPOOKY FICTION AT A DISTANCE: THE PRINCIPLED UNCERTAINTY OF QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO"
The marvelous LITHUB has published an interview of me by the poet and editor Maxine Chernoff.
Read the interview here ...
"In these stories, disasters in war and love trigger peculiar unexpected metamorphoses [...] Cataclysmic apocalypses such as hurricanes, political coups, and military invasions find equal footing with lovers’ quarrels, broken romances, and erotic negotiations. Instead of cause for destruction, these catastrophes become opportunities for transformation—especially from human to non-human." - Maxine Chernoff
QW: Every day, I thought about how we handle the aftermath of great disasters from which we cannot possibly survive intact. What happens after the comprehensive existential destruction of our bodies, minds, and psyches? In what new form do we emerge from the destruction of an established self?
I started wondering about how transformation can become a liberation strategy more powerful than simply hoping to heal or survive. As humans we are weighed down by the idea that trauma breaks us, and we worry that we cannot be repaired. Perhaps repair is not the best and highest goal. Every inhabitant of the cosmos—animal, vegetable, and mineral—thrives through metamorphosis. Creation itself cannot occur without radical transformation, even destruction.
I’m interested in war and romantic love because they are two profoundly unstable states in which normalcy vanishes, familiar boundaries dissolve, and we face the ultimate intimate encounter with dreams and nightmares, fantasy and horror, the unreal and the sublime. Our lives, our sanity, our autonomy are all part of a volatile chemistry experiment. Perfect conditions for radical change.
The title is drawn from the Water Tests of the medieval witch trials, in which misfits and outcasts were thrown in the water—if they floated, they were burned as witches. And if they sank, they drowned. Either way, the accused was going to be murdered. Sometimes events force us to stand outside conventional existence and inhabit ourselves more honestly, earnestly, and sincerely. When a witch hopes to float, she or he lives—even if briefly—as a true self, an honest self, a no-longer-everyday self, no matter how transgressive, and no matter what the consequences. |
"FIELDWORK" published in Guernica, exhibited at Ronald Feldman Gallery, and featured in an interview in Hyperallergic
Autobiographical Photographs, Essays,
Poems, and Performances on Gender Violence by Quintan Ana Wikswo
Feature Interview in HyperAllergic
Click here to read ...
Nonfiction Essay in Guernica magazine
Click here to read ...
Exhibition in "Wave and Particle" at Ronald Feldman Gallery in NYC
Click here for details ...
Selected Images, Installations & Texts
Click here to view ...
FIELDWORK is a suite of photographs, essays, poems, texts, solo performance works, artifacts, video installations, and site-specific gestures based in autobiography and memoir surrounding gender violence, and inhabits Wikswo's decades in the Southwest, US-Mexico border, and her time as a fieldworker setting up safe houses for sex trafficked women and children on the Tohono O'Oodham Reservation.
FIELDWORK invokes the artist’s alter-ego, Vulture Vigilante – a skinwalker hybridized of half-woman, half-scavenger of the dead – who inhabits gender violence sites, harvesting out the beliefs and behaviors of a human society in which the murders of women and girls are a normalized part of daily life. Her role is shamanic, for she walks between the world of the visible living and the invisible dead…yet she also walks between the versions of reality in which female lives are worthless and our violent deaths unremarkable, and a new future in which our bodies and psyches have intrinsic value. As the Vulture locates these bodies, she reveals that the bodies themselves are also hybrids – the women are being transformed from victims into vigilantes. She stands on their graves, invoking them to rise from the dead and seek retribution, justice, and social change. |
"CARRIED BURIED BENEATH CATALPA BEANS/MOUNTAIN SWEEP at F.A.C.T. MUSEUM IN THE U.K.
"Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age"
F.A.C.T. / Foundation for Art and Creative Technology / Liverpool
5 March - 17 May / 2015
Wikswo's work was a Critic's Pick
in The Guardian. "The New York artist Quintan Ana Wikswo shows photographs whose foreboding atmosphere is accentuated by simulations of the hypersensitive vision caused by post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Click here to read...
Click here to view the project...
The exhibition explores the complex relationship between technology, society, and mental health.
Click here to explore...
Quintan Ana Wikswo’s suite of photographs, poems, and essays surrounds the Western State Lunatic Asylum, Central State Mental Hospital, and the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded: three segregated United States government-run eugenics asylums in rural Virginia. She created the work at the mass graves, cemeteries, and medical facilities using salvaged government cameras and typewriters manufactured during the 1930s and 40s by institutional slave labor. Under the pretense of providing psychiatric care, these three asylums were used to segregate, persecute, and police the lives of people who were deemed noncompliant to social norms. With a proud and publicly stated ideology of wealthy white supremacist social purity, these facilities perpetrated catastrophic crimes against humanity throughout the entire 20th century, and created a legacy of bigotry that still pervades mental health institutions today. |
WIKSWO'S WORK INCLUDED IN BROOKYN MUSEUM OPEN COLLECTION, ARCHIVES & LIBRARY
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052
Wikswo's artist books, exhibition catalogues, manuscripts, photographs, video installations, paper ephemera and other project materials from the artist's studio have been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum archive and library.
Works include pieces from Sonderbauten and Fieldwork, as well as The Alchemist Suite and Schwarzer Tod and the Useless Eaters,
These materials will be searchable online, and available soon for public viewing upon request.
Learn more about the Brooklyn Museum's Open Collection and Archives ... |
LAUNCH OF CONTOS + WIKSWO / MEMORY, HISTORY, MYSTERY AND MYTHOS
ABOUT CONTOS + WIKSWO
Intrigued by how poetics, ritual, and abstraction can become methods for navigating – and expanding – the maps of conventional realities, Matthew Contos and Quintan Ana Wikswo create multidisciplinary arts projects at sites with complex ecologies of memory, history, mystery, and mythos.
At trash dumps and volcanic calderas, warplane runways and migratory bird nesting sites, we invoke a space where divergent and sometimes formidable realities, experiences and emotions can be expressed, explored, experienced, and shared.
We seek to expand the fixed routes we have come to accept, and to travel unexpected paths through the in-between and the unimagined, chance and accident, miracles and disappointments, the mistakes, the silences, the blindnesses and illuminations.
Explore more about Contos + Wikswo ...
LAUNCHING "RESTLESS IBERIA"
September - December 2015 / Portugal, Spain and Andorra
An expansive project in poetics and literature, visual art, performance, ritual, and community-based collaboration, Contos & Wikswo’s RESTLESS IBERIA is an interdisciplinary meditation upon migration, sanctuary, and existential transformation. We follow the sanctuaries humans, animals, and plants have mapped in the earth as they attempted to overcome political, ideological, and ecological boundaries, persecutions, and oppressions. A millennia of restricted movement has created existential transformation in the living things which still traverse it...a process perhaps even more powerful than healing.
Read more about RESTLESS IBERIA...
Make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION or learn about BECOMING A PARTNER ... |
 (c) Quintan Ana Wikswo / THE DELICATE ARCHITECTURE OF OUR GALAXY / from THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR |
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