Talk | Politics of Poetics: Heid E. Erdrich and Andrea Carlson

– Hello, everyone. It’s my great pleasure to welcome you to the MCA. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Iris Colburn. I’m a curatorial associate here at the MCA.

– [Audience Member] Whoo.

– Thank you. Love this energy. I wanna welcome you today to our program, The Politics of Poetics: Heid E Erdrich and Andrea Carlson. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you to our generous funders for all of your support. A full list of all of our incredible supporters are here on our screen. I also really wanna thank our friends at the Center for Native Futures, who just hosted a beautiful workshop with Heid and a number of participants.

– Whoo.

– I really can’t see you, but I can hear you, and I love it. And this was just a couple of hours ago, so thank you so much. Thank you for being here. And, of course, thank you to Heid and Andrea back down somewhere off-stage for being here. Before we turn to the program, I wanna remind us all to turn off our cell phones unless, of course, you’re using it for captioning. And I’m happy to share that today’s program is part of a relatively new series called The Politics of Poetics, which invites poets whose practices embody the political in writing, teaching, activism, and in their very being to give readings and whole conversation with artists whose work does the same. And I’d love to thank my fabulous colleague, Daniel Atkinson, as well as our former colleague, Christiana Castillo, for conceiving this really important series and for thinking about Andrea and Heid’s work with me. This program, of course, I hope you all know, is held in conjunction with Andrea’s current show on view here at the MCA on our fourth floor. It’s titled “Shimmer on Horizons,” and it’s up through February 5th, so please come back often to visit us and the show. This is an exhibition that brings together work in sculpture, video, painting, and it really focuses on Carlson’s engagement with the landscape, how she toys with the landscape genre to address ongoing histories of both colonial expansion and Indigenous resistance. And I have to say, of course, the MCA is a really interesting and fitting place to host Carlson’s work and thinking around landscape since, you know, we have such a great proximity to Lake Michigan and the horizon line referenced in the title. But also, we’re in a city that’s situated within many ancestral lands of many Native nations, including the Odawa, the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe, and we’re in a city home to one of the largest Indigenous populations in the US. And, of course, the MCA itself is on land that is created out of landfill by the City of Chicago, landfill and land that effectively revised the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and as Carlson has reminded us very explicitly in her recent piece on the Chicago Riverwalk, “You’re on Potawatomi land. This land has never been ceded by any Native nation to the US government.” And reflecting recently on what it means to have her show here, Carlson, who’s a really incredible writer herself, wrote, “My seascapes have rewatered that area and have reshimmered the watery horizon there, if only in my mind.” And I hope that today through poetry, conversation, but also through deep friendship, we will think to this other kind of place together as Carlson comes into conversation with no other than her longtime friend, Heid Erdrich, Minneapolis’s inaugural poet and recipient of numerous awards including from the Library of Congress and the National Poetry Series. Erdrich is also a teacher, a curator, an artist, and an author of several books, three of which, one up here, it has Carlson’s work on their cover. Heid Erdrich and Carlson have been in conversation for some time, so this is a really beautiful, rare opportunity for us to hear them speak together today. Erdrich will read first and then be joined on stage by Carlson shortly thereafter for a conversation. And now, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Heid Erdrich.

– Iris, miigwech, thank you. Iris is a little taller than me. My name is Heid Erdrich, and I announced myself in Ojibwe. I am from Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. I’m really happy to be here in Chicago today and with Andrea, who always gives me a million ideas. And I’m gonna show you a little bit how, in my poetry, I have learned things from Andrea. She always thinks it’s funny when I look down my glasses, so I’m gonna switch to the other glasses and not give her the pleasure. I’m gonna read a poem that’s not in any of my books but that I wrote along a conversation with Andrea, and maybe we’ll get to talk about it a little bit later. But this first poem is about what is known as a muskeg or a swamp, which I think is appropriate to Chicago ’cause also a swamp land. And the dictionary definition of muskeg says it’s full of dead things, decomposition, moss, rot, sedge, peat, and highly decomposed humus. Humus, the earth, not the dip. But all of the information about muskeg that you read in English in a dictionary is about death, and in Ojibwe, the muskeg is mashkiig, which means the medicine place. It has life in its name, so it’s of two different worldviews. So this is just a really quick poem along those lines. It’s more of a conversation opener. “That brown water, there’s nothing in it, no fish. Water browned with tannin, shot through with golden light, green moss below, seen through reflection of blueness, grayness, redness. There’s nothing in it where it’s water, where it’s not. Deeper than it looks, the gathering place, the medicine place. There’s everything in it, that place, that water.” So if you looked up mashkiig in an Ojibwe dictionary, and you can, there’s a beautiful online dictionary called Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, if you look that up, you would hear, and you could hear people say the words, you would hear words that are all about medicine, healing, spirit. Mashkiki, the word for medicine comes from mashkiig ’cause that’s where we gathered our medicines. So that was the beginning of a conversation with Andrea that went on and also Rozalinda, so hopefully, we’ll get to talk about that a little bit. And in other books that I was able to work on since I met Andrea have real direct relationships within them. But before I asked Andrea for the first piece of artwork for the cover of a book, I hadn’t met her, and yet I went to an art exhibit, the second one that I went to of hers, and saw that we were kind of investigating the same things. And I wrote a book called “National Monuments.” I had just written a book called “The Mother’s Tongue,” and this is a book where I’d started my interest in what is monumental. How do people leave their mark on the land across cultures? What goes into a museum? How is that considered monument or monumental? And this is about a petroglyph, “Vermillion Hands Petroglyph.” “Red ochre on rock, this kiss you blew in pigment that outlines your hand. Centuries waved by, gestures sealed with the lasting bond the sturgeon taught us, her leaping look, the bend of her linked spines, saurian, ancient, enduring. Teach me back into time until I know there is no time. My hand to yours for years and years.” And I’m gonna read from the books. So the first book that Andrea gave me a cover image for was called “National Monuments,” and you’ll see the image in the slideshow later. It was a piece called “Vaster Empire.” And that book, “National Monuments,” was even more about museum collections and how we look at those things. This piece is from “Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media,” and it was a book after “National Monuments” in which I explored being a curator and what it means. And it may even have been Andrea who said this to me, but somebody I was working with as a curator in a community gallery in Minneapolis said, “I don’t care what you write on the didactics or the tags, but it would be really cool if you just wrote a poem.” So I started doing something along those lines for myself, not for the gallery. And since then, I’ve actually done pairing poems with artists. And this is a piece for “Ink Babel,” a large-scale work that Andrea did, and the conversations we had around it. The book is about communication in archaic media, ways that we communicated that we no longer have available to us. And one of the images in that large work of Andrea’s is of a Fresnel lens, and I recognized it when she was working on it. I saw a few pieces, I was like, “Oh, that’s a Fresnel lens” because it was a way of communication across vast distances. And it was the light in a lighthouse that could be made to communicate by different sweeps and different kinda patterns that were made with it. Not like, not exactly like Morris code, but there was an understanding of how the light looked. It was also, Andrea told me, called the Wiindigo eye by Ojibwe because it looked like a giant’s eye when it was first built, so I went and ran with that. Curatan, sorry, “Curatorial statement for Wiindigo eye. Viewing this work through the lens of Fresnel, an oblique critical angle might be arrived at, and we may appreciate the layers of flat and curved surface, the distinct cultural experience refracted in the black and white. Each section of the whole builds imaging and non-imaging so that areas of text, ♪ There’s a picture opposite me ♪ ♪ Of my primitive ancestry ♪ ♪ That stood on rocky shores ♪ ♪ And kept the beaches shipwreck-free ♪ might act as a non-image. Convexly, the artist’s DNA left as she crimped the paper, sucked the brush to a fine tip, hiccuped, tore a nail, creates an image of the Indigenous corpus. That this image arises entirely from non-visible elements, and yet we see figures we relate to our engagement, surely shows the work itself commands us to interact with it. That the type of interaction is not specified means less than that we viewers scrape the underside of a well-muscled 100-pound paper, send the sample, and await results. Or, as critic Jessica Kolopenuk asserts, ‘They can learn their true ancestry. They can now feast on the genetic contents of their own flesh. They have themselves become host to the Wiindigo.'” So, yeah, it was a little tongue-in-cheek, but they went on in that vein for quite a while. And I think that there’s one of those curatorial statements in each part of this book, “Curator of Ephemera,” and it’s meant to be a little bit like walking through galleries, and there’s some unmakeable exhibits in it. My most recent book, “Little Big Bully,” which has “Exit” on its cover, which borrowed the work “Exit” by Andrea Carlson, was much more a book that was informed by conversations with Andrea during some really hard times in 2018, 2019 and as I was finishing it in 2020. And there’s a long poem in here about, that I’m not gonna read to you, don’t worry, it’s about the view you get on a highway going 70, 73 miles per hour, which is what our car likes to do, and how when I see that median along the highway, the land along the highway, I know that some of it belongs to the state, some of it belongs to the Department of Natural Resources, that some of it belongs to tribes. It’s all split up. And so looking at it, if somebody makes a change in that landscape, they make it without making a request of Native nations, and yet it’s still in large part how we relate. I knew that to that land, how we relate to that land, and I knew that Andrea was writing and making images like “Exit” about things on the highway. And what you see is she was going east from Minnesota to Chicago, and I was going east or west from Minneapolis to North Dakota, and I often wrote poems about that experience and about how that’s our landscape. But I also thought a lot about the climate in my coming and going, so this is a poem about where is the wild if what we mostly see is on the highway. It’s a lot of other things, too. “All Nations.” “I would like to think that they’ve gone off somewhere safer. Chevron finch wing, split swallowtail. Not gone gone, just off, not halved. Clap of doves, yellowhammer flicker. Even now, extinction sounds a bit, what, otherworldly? Dinos on lost islands. Meadowlark, vibrato, loon, tremolo, warbler, warbler, warblers. Once a thousand specks too quick to see, except as a totality, a trembling tree. Some think at our accomplishment, say extermination. Blackbirds contract like a thought cloud above a cartoon. One notion suddenly turns a helix. A message, one nation. I like to think they’ve gone off. It’s these floods that drove them away. The way fear makes me think I’ll fly apart, leave my shoes on earth. So I weigh my body down, a grounded creature. I like to think of the badger. I honk to avoid tragedy. Bad enough, two lanes make a monarch murderer of me. To think how aerodynamics save most, boosted over my windshield. The badger, no doubt drawn to the road to eat, killed. Dragonflies, checkers, skippers, grasshoppers, moths, my tiny extermination. Before I weighed my body down, I was so small, so sure butterflies loved me, trusted my outstretched hands, painted ladies landed, licked the salt off my palms, then the corners of my mouth. Native child of the last post-war, I heard extermination in the policy called termination. Saw yellow stars and children packed like cattle, their faces our future faces. And even when I knew our grandfather fought to stop the termination of our tribe, and even when the robins kept spring from silence, when eagles started their return, my fear flew off with me. I knew, won’t unknow, whole nations can be unmade on paper and in cages. They did it once, they’ll try again. I would like someone to set it down. We are as made, wild, original. To say it on paper, we are the children of creation under some protection, our rights equal to eagles. They would like to think we’ve gone. Not gone gone, off, not halved. Extinction sounds like other worlds, other words, extermination, termination. Wild sparrows glean my yard, scrape up what’s left, then they’ll be gone. I like to think they will be back. We try to make a stop for birds, a home for beasts. A possum once, a woodchuck mom who sunbathed on our deck chair, nursed her pups before the neighbor’s dachshunds found them out. The fence declines, the wild beasts retreat. My mistake, I think, to how, like a child, to think we are safe somehow behind fences, safe on the road’s shoulder, safe somewhere on paper, or that we or any nation could go off somewhere safer, that there’s somewhere still out there closer to wild.” And then I have one more poem I’m gonna do before we get to talk to Andrea, which is the exciting part. And it’s a poem that deals a little bit with my background as a person who is Metis, as well as Anishinaabe or Ojibwe. And I had ancestors from Canada who called themselves Metis, mixed people, spoke the language Michif. My great-grandmother and my grandmother spoke that language. My mother understood it as a child. And Ojibwe people called the Metis the Wiisaakode, the burnt wood people. And the imagery in Andrea’s work of the beautiful weavings reminds me of Metis weavings, and her work helped me think about weaving that part of my life into my writing as well. So, “Wiisaakode, The Burnt Wood People.” “They roll from the flames, shedding, emerge clean as wood lept from its bark and handsomely smooth as carvings. This explains their knobby knees, their knotty eyes, and long-limbed ladies. This explains their buried hearts, their whispers in winter, their warmth. We oaks, we old rattle another season’s last leaves, hang them red against the north wind, hold them as long as we can, the last leaved shelter on this savanna. 100 years ago, 100 years from now, we would stand over them, stand hard. Let them remember their need for fire. Fire that breaks the shell, that engenders the seed, fire that makes them, makes them over.” Thank you. Will you come out? Hi, I’m just gathering all my papers while Andrea comes out, hi.

– [Andrea Carlson] Got your stuff?

– Okay, got my stuff. So now we’re gonna be quiet here for a second ’cause we’re all like nervous, and we can’t really see you, but generally, we just talk nonstop when we get to talk. So I haven’t seen the show yet, so I’m a complete poser coming out here. I have seen most of the works in the show in one state or another of doneness or undoneness. So how’d that sound, reading, I don’t think I’ve ever read all the Andrea poems or most of them at once. How did that sound to you?

– Oh my, I’m so, I mean, I am incredibly flattered and grateful. And it is one of those things where, like when we accidentally research the same things, or we’re accidentally interested in the same things, which is cool when it’s like Fresnel lenses.

– Oh, yeah, like sometimes it’s the image of the thing that is so fascinating as well. And like the Fresnel lens being the way it works is image and imaging and anti-imaging. I’m like, oh, that was made for me to think about image and anti-image in museum studies, that sort of thing, so.

– It’s like it focuses the light down into a tinier slit to shoot it out further. So like the anti-image pulls it in, and so you can see it from longer distances. They’re fascinating. I mean, that’s a cool thing that we kind of both knew. And then I remember this one time we did a interview together, and we were talking about pink river dolphins.

– Oh, yeah, that was really strange. I had this moment where I was, I was looking, oh, no. Andrea sent me a picture of a pink river dolphin, and I was like, “I am not lying to you. I just read this poem by Elizabeth Bishop about the pink river dolphins,” that like moment. So it wasn’t just like, oh, we have the same ideas, we read the same things, we run in the same circles. There’s something like a little bit weird going on.

– Is really specific. And then, like how that backfires is I remember once we were like interviewed by someone, and we were talking about like zombie mermaids and pink river dolphins, and then that ended up being like “Two Artists Connect Over Zombie Mermaids and Pink River Dolphins.” Like, that was the headline. And we’re like, we need to rein it in. That’s not what my work’s about.

– No, that’s not it.

– But then we’re like, where’s the lie? It’s kinda okay.

– Yeah, true, true. And then I think, too, like, because I think we both have, I don’t know. I’ll ask you the question. Collage has always been a big part of my aesthetic, and I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about how much that works for you in your work. I mean, you don’t literally collage, but how does collecting or, you know, how does that work in what you do?

– I mean, the work is all very much so like hand-processed and rendered through my body. At the same time, when I’m gathering reference sources and material, I mean, it is kind of, it’s collected, it’s gathered, it’s curated into the space. And those relationships between various reference points, there’s an energy held between them. One of the things that I kind of face or I come up against is some people think that the imagery that I’m referencing is honorific, and that’s not always the case, but sometimes it is. But I will hold sometimes very conflicting, like maybe harmful imagery next to healing imagery, or there’s a relationship where things are brought together. Transitional spaces are really important, not only to like a Ojibwe culture, when you think of like dusk and where ceremonies happen or like drums that have a line painted down the middle. These liminal spaces where two things come together is where like, that’s also where medicine is. These, you know, shorelines. And if you think of things like the medicine bags, there’ll be, you know, a thunderbird on one side woven, and there’ll be a Mishipeshu on the other. It’s these things held in the space of things that are seemingly opposed, and so you’ll see a lot of like bilateral symmetry that I can organize almost anything in. Like, you know, that it’s this type of working kind of allows for many different references, different textures, yeah, different ways of working. It can look like drawing. It can look like painting, and that’s all, you know, very intentional to the work. But then I also run the risk of people who haven’t seen it physically in real life assuming that it’s actual like cutout collage. And so that I always try to like say that the work is collage-like, but just to make sure that if people haven’t seen the work in real life, that they realize that, you know, it just seems that way. It’s painted that way, and that’s intentional, yeah.

– Yeah, that’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about it before, but when you contributed a few pieces to a video poem film that I was working on called “Preoccupied,” and we wanted to have them animated, right? So I didn’t give any instruction to the animator, Jonathan Thunder, who’s a painter and a digital artist, amazing artist. But Jonathan actually did like a cutout on one of them and made it look very more dimensional and collage-like, and I was thrilled because I had done a fair amount of that work for the imagery in the piece as well. But I didn’t know that people might think there was an actual, so I wouldn’t contribute to the misunderstanding that you’d cut anything up.

– No, and like, to tell you the truth, when I edit film, I’ve done a few, and I really enjoy editing film, and I feel like it feels like painting to me, that there’s something that the process of it feels similar. But, you know, maybe. I don’t wanna like, limit my horizons. Maybe I will do collage at some point.

– Yeah.

– It could happen.

– Like, I’m thinking, too, like is it all painting? Is it all poetry? Like, there’s so much poetics in your painting. You know, there’s literal tensions with words that are included. But, you know, is it all one thing to you? Do you feel like enacting? I know ’cause I know that Andrea writes poetry, too, and she’s a good poet, and I’ve published her. And, you know, do you ever just have this moment, like I’ve just fallen off the edge of my understanding of what it all is. It’s all just one thing.

– I have to say, I don’t know if I’m brave or I just have no self-awareness, but like Heid is the poet laureate of Minneapolis. She’s a really important poet, and I’ll be like dabbling and write a poem and like, text it to Heid, and she’s so encouraging and is like, “I like that.” You know, I’m like, I don’t think it’s necessarily good poetry, but.

– I like it. You know, if I’m interested, somebody’s gonna be interested. And I mean, to me, it’s not unlike some of the things you create or write about. I mean, maybe it’s a quicker process, but they’re sort of statements that go along the lines of some of the things that interest you, so.

– There’s like kind of a reduction happening in language ’cause I do like writing essays, too. But just, like that there’s something about poetry where it’s like, okay, these are all of these, like how can I bring it down? And I think poetry, a lot like painting, there’s something that, like, feelings and emotions, and like this is a space where that can exist. And that space between the viewer and the art or the reader and the poem or even listening to poetry, where feelings, like, and emotions are allowed to happen, you know? So much of the time, we overintellectualize things, and I think that it’s really important to just let feeling happen, understand it on a felt way instead of, you know, just intellectual. There’s also this kind of idea when, you know, you see a lot of my works, people will think there’s like a codex. Like, I can’t figure out what your work means. Can you break down like why is this this color? And, you know, like they’re trying to pin the tail on the donkey as far as what the references are. And but then I try to push back a little bit because I think that there’s this possessiveness about knowledge. It’s like I wanna know what it is intellectually, so I have the inside information, and I possess that information about it. Like, or if I understand it, or if I have knowledge of it, it becomes my property. So I sometimes get very careful of what I share. But also, we saddle people with stories sometimes. You know, like if you give someone a story, then they’re carrying that story. And so sometimes I retain information. I pull back.

– Yeah, I mean, it’s a thin line between, you know, being deliberately holding back, as you said, or pulling back and allowing people in. I feel like sometimes I could explain every part of a poem, but I’m more interested in what other people have at that moment, and I accept a lot of what they have. I mean, it has a mathematics to it, a formal progression to me. It’s not accidental. It’s not random. But there’s lots of meeting places in there, and if somebody found one meeting place, then that’s good. Stay in that meeting place. I’m not being coy when I’m like, “I’m not gonna explain it all to you.” And no, it might not be the same thing in one piece than it is in the next. I just really do want people to come to it and meet it because it’s sort of like that liminal space. You know, standing before one of your artworks is pushing, you know, you’re putting people into that liminal moment where they can interact and have that opening. It’s like a door, you know? It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, what is the word for a doorway that starts with an L. A lintel or no? It’s something like that. Is that the window? That’s the window.

– I don’t know. Like, is John, like, he knows.

– John would know. We always depend on.

– But I think that’s important to have like access points into the world, into the works that you don’t like own or close on people, too. I know that with some of my work, for example, when the black and white kind of large piece comes up, that’s “Ink Babel,” I remember after I painted it, you’re like, “It looks like the wave patterns off the back of a,” this piece here, “like it’s the wave patterns off the back of a boat.” And it’s 10 stacked landscapes. And you said that, and I had already painted it. It was done, and I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know how it slipped my mind. But you said that, and now, when I describe it, that’s where I go to. But I didn’t come up with that. That was you. And but I’m like, yeah, I accept that.

– But it’s not the only thing that it is to me either ever. They’re so dynamic. I’m always looking at ’em. I mean, I can see the filmic quality of it. There are so many things. And also, I’ve been lucky enough to stand, you know, where I could only get 10 feet from this thing and look at it for, I’m not lying, hours. So I had a whole different relationship with it that is, you know, barely documented in any way. It’s just, you know, me letting my eye follow all these different directions on the piece and have a lot of thoughts that went with that about communication and about what imagery is out there that represents us, you know, in the universe. You know, were we to go through this brief blip, some of these things would remain beyond us. And it just gives me a lot of thought about all the languages and what has been sent out there. So that’s why I chose for the cover of “Curator of Ephemera” the piece that’s the disc that went out into the universe with-

– From the Voyager, which we know a thing about voyagers. But in that mission, this like golden.

– The Metis thing, the voyageur.

– The golden disc-

– Disc, yeah.

– that went out to tell the story of Earth.

– Yeah, of humanity from some small committee’s point of view. And yet there it goes. It’s gonna get there before anything else, except for radio waves, I think, right?

– Yeah.

– All the radio will get there before, so-

– Yeah.

– before they get bombarded with all the television, which then they’re gonna come after us after that for all that noise pollution and imagery pollution that we put into the universe.

– The they. They are gonna come after us.

– They, yeah, I’m not sailing, it’s aliens. Yeah, so I mean, I think we talked a lot about communicating and not communicating, and that’s what is in “Curator of Ephemera” from my point of view. But I think because your work has text in it sometimes, there’s like a little bit of a moment where people might try to title from your work. What do you think about that? ‘Cause the titles and the words in the pieces are not the same, you know?

– Sometimes, like with the “VORE” series, which is all the cannibal works. I did this cannibal series. They come from actual films that exist. Recently, I started like a reboot of the “VORE” works, but then not giving the agency of titling to those films but making up my own. And then, sometimes, there’s like a mismatch, like I make the viewer work a little bit harder. There might be a text right in the middle of the work, but the title will be different just because there’s also a relationship between, you know, when you’re talking about those things coming together, between the actual title of the work and the words in the text, they’re different, but they’re also in communication with each other as well. So I do, I like to keep people guessing with some of that. Or there’s a little bit extra opportunity to put in more language through titles. Titles are hard, though. I have to say, like, I really struggle with titles, and, you know, I’ve stolen from people’s poetry. You know, the “Shimmer on Horizon” title for this exhibition comes from a Throwing Muses song about like a space of safety, of a place out of reach. She shimmers on horizon, and she, like, is harder to be harmed, or she’s in a safe place that she has control of. And so I was thinking about that in terms of colonization and how, like, is there a space beyond the reach of colonization? We think a lot about decolonization. We think a lot of Indigenization. We think a lot about space, and so I was thinking about, well, could there be a space out of reach where the colonial harm can’t get to?

– Yeah, I think we were talking about that a little bit before when we came up for mic check, and I think that that is a vibe that we’ve been on for a while together. And there’s two poems that I think of that came. I knew when I was writing them that there was something about talking to Andrea in them. And one was called “Dark Sky Reserve,” where I made the mistake. I was looking up, I don’t remember what I was Googling, but something came up the dark sky reserve and I thought, is that in Canada? Is that a reservation? I didn’t know what it was at first, and then, you know, I learned that it’s the places where there’s less light pollution on the planet. But it was that sort of misunderstanding that kinda goes hand in hand with the trying to meet and understand. And so then, when you move toward the shimmer, it reminded me of how at the end of writing “Little Big Bully,” we talked for a long time, and I was ordering my poems and trying to figure out what fit. And there was only one order issue that my editor had, and he wanted this poem called “Reprieve” to be the last poem in the book. And in that poem, something happens, and human beings can see other colors than exist for us right now, which apparently there’s no reason that can’t happen, so it could just suddenly happen that we all saw a new color. And I imagined it as being sort of a shift in human thinking. So it ends with people who are kind of living out some apocalyptic moment that happens, and it says something along the lines of, “Some gave up when Jesus did not come. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’m done with dying.’ Now this, this shimmer, everlasting lake of time where every child born is ours, every child mine.” So it was like a moment at the end. And he was right to put that at the end because it’s about that beyond what we know. I call it like a deluge of knowledge. You know, we could be deluged with-

– Yes.

– a lot of things, but we could also be deluged with knowledge. These things are all still possible. There could be something beyond, you know, this, this post-apocalypse that is, you know, beyond colonization. I think a lot of the poems in the end of my book are about that in the end of “Little Big Bully.” And then I saw your piece called “Perpetual Care,” and I immediately said, “I want that for a book cover.” Because it gave me this idea of this everlasting shimmer that I feel is just like this something on the horizon that I don’t have the dread that I once had over it because there’s just as much possibility that we will go somewhere new. It might be really hard getting there, and no doubt it will be, but that says some of the same things to me. So, and then I think, though, that I won’t use the same title for my book, and that’s always a problem because there’s gonna be, like “Exit.” It says “Exit,” then it says “Little Big Bully,” so it’s like full of words. But I have been thinking about perp, or “Everlasting Wake.” What do you think of that?

– Well, so, and we know a lot of people with Ojibwe names that have this like flicker. The shimmer is also like a flicker. Waawaatesi is our word for firefly, with the like kind of flickering tail or flickering light. But it’s a light source of flickering, so that would also be like maybe with the Fresnel lens, but also like that’s, or , is the shimmer on the lake. So there’s a lot of people. Pebaam’s wife, that’s her name. So and I know a lot of people with names that have this shimmering and flickering. Our word for film has it, in it’s a flickering image.

– Or .

– Yep, yep. So I think-

– And the Northern Lights.

– The Northern Lights, that’s our dancing ancestor. So it’s kind of, it’s already like the built-in poetry of the language.

– Yeah, the poetics are already there, and they’re also, I mean, forever how much there are cultural urges in my work, that’s something I’ve thought about for a long time, so that’s there, and for you, too, probably.

– Yeah.

– Yeah.

– Yeah, well, I would love to have “Perpetual Care” on one of your books. This piece also has a couple of like, meteors coming in. And maybe even-

– What?

– comets on the side. I’ll show you when we’re up there.

– What?

– So it’s also kind of a end of the world-ish thing, but.

– Okay, now I’m excited.

– Yeah, there’s a lot going on. The idea of “Perpetual Care,” too, I was doing a residency in New Orleans. And the cemeteries in New Orleans are pretty fantastic. And I was noticing on a lot of the graves the text perpetual care like, on it.

– Sure.

– And it’s because it’s the onus of the graveyard to keep those graves up, to mow the lawn, or to like repair, make any repairs on the headstones, and then, but it puts the onus on the graveyard as opposed to the families, that the perpetual care is that it will be cared for because the family’s probably paid more money, I guess. I’m not sure how it works. But I was thinking about that, like the act of care. Like, who is the onus on, you know? And so, so often it’s, you know, when there’s harm, colonial harm that’s been done, the ones that are stuck fixing it and are in the care position are those that are the most invested. And so when it comes to the earth, it’s Indigenous folks. That’s what we’re seeing again and again, that the perpetual care of the land ends up belonging to Indigenous folks ’cause we’re more invested. It’s our relative, so we’re there for it. So I’ve been thinking about that kind of thing a lot. There’s also a piece, “Perpetual Genre,” which is like the harm of colonization seems to perpetuate. All of these things, the flickering, the perpetualness, is, I think, kind of a conversation or a theme of Indigenous futurism. I kind of think of Indigenous futurism, and “Curator of Ephemera,” I think, is an Indigenous futurist text. I don’t know if you’d agree. But there’s this idea of imagining ourselves richly. There’s this idea of kind of like right now, we know this condition, and this like kind of very interesting spot that we’re in right now politically, and then the future hasn’t necessarily been written. It’s a space of play. It’s a space where we can imagine our survival. We can imagine it in a robust way. We can have projection that can be maybe like the horizon, that serenity space that isn’t harmed yet. So there’s like, maybe that’s a very optimistic take.

– Well, I mean, why not be optimistic, you know? Many things can tell you that things aren’t going well, but they are not forever. And, you know, many people have survived. You know, when the conversations started to shift in poetry toward what I call apocalyptic poetics, where people just have to own that climate change, own that apocalypse, and I was like, there are people who have been here already. Indigenous people all over the planet have seen every single thing change about their daily lives. The creatures they loved and had a relationship with and depended on are gone. The landscape’s utterly changed. The language is gone. You know, that sort of thing. So it’s like if you wanna, you know, not worry about that happening to you, take a look at how it happened to other people and try not to do that, you know? So I just like, I didn’t wanna be part, I don’t really wanna be part of that. I don’t really get considered echo poetic because of that, I think.

– Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I remember like reading once that in kind of the height of the Cold War, there was this graffiti that was left throughout San Francisco that was like, it said, “The bomb already fell. We are the mutants.”

– Oh.

– And I was like, it kind of stuck with me, where it’s just like the end of the world has already happened for someone based on, it’s not about technological or the future enhancements here and there. Like the future is already for some people that have the privilege, but, you know, there’s also the end of the world. We’re constantly living in ends of the world.

– Yeah, it’s just, it’s a moving horizon.

– Yeah.

– And, you know, but it’s also new worlds are always reforming. You know, there’s just, I think, you know, feeling and thinking about time in a limited way creates a lot of the fuel for fear and, you know, competitiveness and war. And trying to relearn a relationship to time through art, I think, is gonna be one of the important things that people can do. And I really do it. Like, my mind goes into time, all sorts of broadened time when I look at your work. So do you think about time?

– Yes, all the time. All the time, I think of the time.

– There we go.

– But, I mean, there’s also things like deep time. And it’s just so, it’s really cool that like people, like, there’s rock beings. Like we have the imprint of their bodies, and we know they existed, but we’ve never met them. There’s been, what, at least like five mass extinctions before where almost like 90, 95% of the life has already been taken from this planet and then has come back. Like, we are the mutants.

– Yeah.

– We are so much the mutants right now.

– We’re the fast ones.

– We are pretty fast. Yeah, so I think about that a lot. When I was thinking about the idea of like perpetuity, too, this perpetual or infinite space, it’s also thinking about, like for our Indigenous folks, we often get the term time immemorial, time immemorial. It’s like our stuff is immemorial. We have no idea where the origins are. It’s just time immemorial. This is like whenever back. And so it’s like, okay, well, that’s always like back reflective. Natives are also kind of denied contemporaneity.

– That’s true, yeah.

– Like we’re seen as, you know, anachronistic, you know? Like, oh, there’s a Native here. Like, did they come from the past? And so I think that Indigenous futurism, like, kind of tries to maybe like look towards the future, but then like, what’s the opposite of time immemorial? Like, it would be time, like, perpetual. I see that in all the contracts I sign. They’re like, they want perpetual rights to, you know? We see that. That’s where we see it is in contracts when we have our intellectual information acquired. So, so I was like, okay, well, maybe. Maybe we can use some of these terms to describe our existence, too, in the future, or, yeah. So I mean, I think about time a lot. I think of deep time. There’s kind of this famous Native artist. I was on a panel, and I was talking about NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and how like our ancestors, thousands of our ancestors, their bones are in museum collections. And, you know, I was kinda painting a grave picture of museums, and an artist in the audience, I won’t name him, was like, kinda did one of these deep-time things. This like, “Well, in the future, we’re all gonna be dust anyway.” Like, and I was like, “Well, then you can’t complain about anything if, you know, like in an infinite universe, everything’s already happened.” I’m like, yeah, I mean, clearly, no one can say a thing then. So, but then, son of a bitch, he plants a seed in my head about deep time, you know? And then now the new work I’m working on has like, you know, references to fossils and the fossil record, and now I’m like thinking about them dinosaurs and like caring and loving these rocks. So, but it is, you know, it’s definitely time is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Also, just like how space and time are related. Like a lot of my works, the horizon lines are consistent through the work ’cause topologically, we live on a sphere, and what could be more of, you know, an analogy of foreverness than like, you could go around a severe, sphere, severe, sphere, again and again, you know, and it just, and keep going. And colonial ideas maybe around landscape is like landscapes, like it can be divided up, it can be partitioned off, and so I’m kind of doing that in the work. But then, if the horizon line can keep going, then I can acknowledge that it’s continual or that we’re living on a landscape that keeps going.

– [Heid Erdrich] We’re living in a continuum.

– [Andrea Carlson] Mm-hmm, hopefully, maybe not.

– But, you know, I just, I don’t think I ever said this to you before. Maybe I did. I also just think about the curve of the eye in following. Like, especially if I’m in a room with multiple works that have that horizon line in them, I feel like it reminds me that my eye is curved. Does that make any sense?

– Well, and it’s also like the focal point. Like it kinda wraps around ’cause it’s the long landscapes.

– Yeah.

– I mean, there’s like, usually, when you have like a curve, like sometimes, you have to consider that it might keep going. Like our sweat lodges or wigwams, like I was told, like it’s like the belly of the earth. But then, like, you have to imagine that it keeps going underground and that we’re actually sitting in a sphere when we’re in like a wigwam or a sweat lodge, like we have to consider it as spherical. And that’s like, you know, where there’s four cardinal directions. Everyone knows north, south, east, west, but then there’s the seven directions, which is north, south, east, west, then above and below.

– Above, below.

– So four, five, six. Seven is the heart, is the middle that goes in-

– The present, where we are, yeah.

– forever inward. Yeah, so it’s like the above, heart, below, and the cardinal directions like a disc, but then, you know, a sphere with two sides. I don’t know how to describe it.

– This just reminds me of one time you and I were in a museum that shall remain nameless in the collections. Should I not-

– I love how we’re talking shit-

– talk about this?

– ’cause you’re like this museum, and I’m like this artist that I’m not gonna name, and you’re like this museum that I’m not gonna name.

– But we could. And I don’t remember. We were looking at something, and I recognized this concept of Anishinaabe image-making, which is common to other cultures, too. But and we had one of the same teachers, so I carry, or two, two of the same teachers, so I carry his language or their language, as it is above, so it is below. That there’s always a reminder, when you aesthetically try to create something to share with other people about the way the universe works, you have to remember, if you say one thing, then the other thing comes with it. So the dome for the sweat lodge on earth or the mother’s belly, also beneath it is the grave and the other side of the earth. In fact, there’s a name in Ojibwe at the other side of the earth. It’s a very common name to remind people, even in their name, that there’s something else happening in some other sphere. It’s not, you know, only this right now. There’s always the thing that just happened or the thing that’s coming around, which I think is philosophically just a fascinating way to instill a knowledge of not being disconnected as an individual. I just think that’s really cool. And then there’s the other concept of everlasting or perpetual in names and the way you talk about Ojibwe worldview. So is there any of that in the way you think about it, too, of the?

– I feel like, you know, it becomes part of the worldview. I know that when we were all watching “Stranger Things,” during the-

– Yeah, exactly, the upside down.

– the upside down, we’re all like, this is Ojibwe.

– It was, yeah, scary familiar. Of course, there’s an upside down.

– Yeah, no, it’s definitely like how information gets ordered, you know? Like there’s, like, in this piece we’re looking at right now, at the very top is like, is that that surface, with not only the cardinal directions but, I mean, they use the word medicine wheel. I don’t use that. But like the, you know, four directions, like, how we understand it as actually like you twist it a little bit, so it’s almost like pie shapes, like it’s more of an X than a T. And the pie shapes for the directions is because the Sun doesn’t raise, doesn’t rise and set in the same fixed spot throughout the year. You know, you have a solstice, you have a equinox, and you have, you know, it rises and sets on different sides also because we live on a sphere. And so it’s more pie-shaped because, you know, especially if you live on a horizon, you can definitely, you know, see. When I lived in Chicago, I could see the sunrise on Lake Michigan, and I could see how, you know, throughout the year, how it moved along. It would rise at a different spot, you know, throughout the year, and it’s like, oh, that’s why there’s a pie-shaped direction is because of this, the sunlight. But that’s also how you deal with directions living on a sphere, is it, you know, can come back together. So I think I do arrange. I mean, some of my information is considering that as well, you know? The how time and space is related. I feel like I’ve, yeah.

– [Heid Erdrich] Oh, this is just the one that I haven’t spent much time with. I mean, but it is the one that gave me the idea for the wake in my next book, which I haven’t written yet. But just things I’ve been writing about, and how like the wake of time and the ongoingness of grief, frankly. So I really need to look at this and think about it because it really taught me something about, before I saw a earlier version or a reference to this, a work that was referenced to it. So, yeah, I really need to think about that, and that will help me figure it out. Speaking of time, I was told we’d have a clock, and there isn’t one up here, so we could just go on and on.

– [Andrea Carlson] We’re like, we’re really interested in time, like not looking at any time-

– Except for don’t tell us.

– card.

– We’re good. So if anybody wants to say we have five, 10, 15 minutes. I want to hear about “Exit” because not only is it on the cover of my last book, I live with this, this image every day. It’s in my home, and I have a whole relationship to it and a whole sense of it that, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it. All of these things, and I don’t know that we’ve ever talked about that image.

– Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis asked if I would work on a print with them, and, I mean, I had done one print with them prior. And I’m not a printmaker. I kinda know how it works, but I’m really not terribly skilled.

– I’m gonna, I’m gonna interrupt you for a second. Can we see “Exit,” can you? There we go.

– Put it on there? So, but when I was asked to do the second print with them, it was when I was in the process of moving to Chicago from Minneapolis, so I was going on I-94 a lot. And I was thinking about this idea of like the mounds being kind of torn up to make these roads that we were traversing, that I was traversing quite a bit. I went to like Baraboo, Wisconsin to visit Man Mound and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All over their campus, there’s mounds. You can go look online of images of all of the mounds. Some of the student sidewalks that go to different buildings will cut across some of the mounds. They’re all over cornfields. They’re underneath roads, so I was thinking a lot about that. So I was also thinking about the idea, a lot of Indigenous people will hold this kind of sense of trauma in that we’re scared of losing. We’re scared of, we’ve lost so much, but there’s this kind of hurt that we carry around with us that things that we do have just keep getting taken away from us, and it’s then we get a scarcity model. It kinda conditions us in a certain way. So I was thinking of the idea of a print. I’m like, if I make, if they pull, and I have an edition of, you know, 27 or however many prints that exist in the world, there’s something about the safety in numbers. These will go out into the world. They’ll have diaspora. If one gets destroyed someplace, the image will still exist. It’s on your book cover, so now it’s all over, and it’s on a billboard now. So because it’s being replicated, it might weather being destroyed or not being there in the future. So I was thinking about prints as having that. Like the print process and the multiples as having its own safety worked into it. And then this image in particular, “Exit,” is like there’s the bent trees for trail markers, and it’s got the mica.

– The trail trees, yeah.

– The mica hands and talons. Those are pulled, those had been excavated from the mounds, and they’re made out of like mica, like thin mica sheets that had been cut into those images. So I was thinking about what kind of image could I make that would be a sigil for protection for travelers on I-94 like this. If I could make an image that could stick around, you know, and protect the travelers ’cause there is a lot of, you know, death, as in your poem. There’s a lot of-

– Yeah.

– you know, our butterflies.

– [Heid Erdrich] The breakdown lane, yeah.

– So there’s a lot of death along the roads. So I was thinking about that. Like what could I make that could, that there would be safeties through the edition, but also an image that could protect travelers along I-94. And then be very mindful. Those roads are also, a lotta times, you have to consider that the roads we travel every day are really old.

– Yeah.

– They’re like, they’re built on old, old roads.

– Yeah, they’re ancient paths and, you know, that went out for maybe even 10,000 years or more, some of these.

– Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, that’s a Native road, yeah, that’s-

– Yeah, and the ones going west were just like trade routes that go all the way down. They meet up with trade paths that go all the way down to Central America-

– Yep.

– that you can see from, you know, satellite imagery, and they’ve been territories or trails through territories for just a really long time, and it’s sort of extraordinary. And they have like, you know, geologic importance, too. You know, people were walking along the higher ground through Minnesota to get out to North Dakota ’cause it’s, you know, the land of 10,000 lakes. You gotta find the high ground to walk across it ’cause, before they drained everything, it was the only way to get out there and to see people coming and not coming. There’s a lot about safety in these paths and passageways, too. So that’s kind of what I saw in the piece. I mean, and I guess I did know all those things ’cause you did write about it and gave the essay to the book, which was really nice. But there’s this idea of being directed, safety, of, you know, thinking about the body of the earth as we pass through it, over it, on it. Those things all came to me from the image. But then the technical thing that, this is the part I don’t think we’ve talked about, how is it it moves all day long? It, like, moves. It’s like, it shimmers, it’s crazy. How is it? What is it? What’d you make it with, magic?

– It’s I’m entering my crone era. There is metallic inks that are on it that were made from mica. I had no idea that that was the case. So there’s the actual material that those original hand forms have, have that metallic mica is what makes it shimmer. But, yeah, it definitely like kind of follows you. I kinda wanted it to be like, there’s this petroglyph out in Washington State. It’s called like She Who Watches. Oh.

– Yes, She Who Watches.

– [Andrea Carlson] It kinda has a She Who Watches vibe.

– Oh.

– [Andrea Carlson] But, I mean, that wasn’t a direct reference. It was another thing that I like kind of found out about after the print came out, and I’m like, oh, it does. It’s what it is. It’s protecting you, though. It’s not watching you in a creepy way.

– No, not at all. I mean, I always feel like, well, it says exit, so I’m a restless person, so I always feel like I can leave through that portal, you know? When I look at it, I’m like, yes, there’s my portal. And that was really like, important for the book, too, to like exit a time in human history, and particularly American history, where we are oppressed, you know, there is an exit. People have been here before, they’re going on. So, to me, it’s important for that. But I just, I don’t think I ever got to find out technically why it does-

– Why it does.

– all the crazy things it does which you really can’t see them in an image. You have to just stand there with it in different light, which would be different in every place and in every iteration ends up, so I love that idea. It’s a living thing in a way.

– Miigwech.

– So we’re not gonna take questions, but we might ask each other questions, other questions.

– Yeah. You’ve been asking me questions.

– I know, I’ve been asking you questions. That got interviewy.

– I don’t know, I always feel like, like when I write, sometimes, I just, you know, or like usually, it’s I have such a problem with titles, and I’m so weird about language that I’ll just make lists of words and phrases and just to kinda put it out there. And I always imagine like, how on earth, how on earth would someone step into starting to, say, write a novel, or when you have a collection of poems, and they get kind of like arranged, and then like, how are they collected? I know that your curatorial practice is really, you know, rich and beautiful and-

– It’s associative.

– But also, like I feel like that’s also in the books of poetry, too. I have a sense that your curatorial practice and how you go about putting something in between two covers, you know? And then, you had mentioned earlier about like your editor wanting, you know, to end with this poem. Like, are they all printed out? Are they all over the floor? Like, do you pin them up?

– Yeah, I’m not the print it out, put it on the floor kinda person. I’m more the gallery wall kind of person. Like, this one is this big. It goes on that wall, you know? Or, this one needs the light this way, or people need to approach it from that direction or this other direction. This is more of a dimensional piece, so it needs grounding space. They feel like objects to me. They literally feel like they have weight and heft, and I move them around in the gallery space of the book.

– Now I have to reread all of your books. I’m like, like now I wanna read it like I’m walking through a gallery space.

– But see, now I feel like I was mistaken ’cause I really thought making things in multiple panels the way you do that you were doing something similar. You had a whole idea, but you were gonna accrete the individual to make the whole, and that’s definitely how I make a book. But I kind of just superimposed my idea of how a book was made onto how your multi-panel pieces were made. Is there any similarity at all?

– I think so, and there’s definitely a format to the page and the scales and ratios that I’m playing with that like put some bumpers on where, you know, like there are things that I don’t have to necessarily consider for each piece. I can have like a formula. But I think that that would also be like this is the context, like, within the book, or this is the context within a gallery space or the scale or the format of the work. I almost do need some bumpers on because I also think it makes it a space that someone can look at, and it can organize information. Like there’s chaos in one area of the work, and then you can look past it, and you can see the horizon, and it’s a place for your eye to rest. And then maybe emotionally, you can have your anxiety attack up front like I do, and then you can look past it and then have your serenity moments. And it’s also like, sometimes painting for me feels like flower arranging. You know, like it can’t all be the same. Like, you can have a arrangement of roses that are all the same, but sometimes, you know, there’s a random stick hanging out, and then that’s the thing, you know, that kind of breaks up the monotony of a space, or there’s like, just speaking formally, not conceptually. But, yeah, I think about that a lot, about how I can hold someone in that space, how I can hold them. You know, there are so many times I go to art shows and exhibitions, and I walk through the space, and I’m kind of like scan really fast, and I’ll, you know, maybe read the wall text. And I’m like, for my work, I wanna like hold someone for like a second at least, you know? I want them to engage with it maybe from a distance or up close. I wanna give them different access points of distance. And, yeah, so I think about that, like how can I make an image that just I hold them for at least a second, you know? They don’t walk by it because they might not realize what they just saw. They wanna take a step in. So I think about that a lot. Like how the audience, I think about the audience a lot. I think about you.

– [Audience] Aw.

– Yeah, I do, too. I like, I definitely do. I wanna have moment with and a distinct moment for every single person. So that’s like, that’s a hard thing to imagine. And a lotta times, I don’t know who’s read my work, and you don’t know who’s seen your work, so, but you were still there together somehow, you know?

– Yeah.

– It’s really interesting as a conundrum ’cause you don’t wanna think about it too much while you’re in the generational stage, the generative stage.

– Gestational?

– Gestational.

– [Andrea Carlson] Generational stage.

– Gen, gen, generative, that’s what we call for.

– Gen.

– I keep saying it’s not a baby. I don’t wanna talk about my book as a baby. But, I mean, that kinda gives me the other thing that I thought would be my closing question. Are we around closing, or?

– We got like four minutes.

– Oh, okay, so in writing circles, they always say, what are you working on next, which is like a hard question because you’re working on it, right? So you don’t always know what it is. But my question is, how are you working now? How do we work with the, you know, how do you make it possible to work when you’re moving between your studio and your other demands outside the studio?

– I mean, that’s the hardest thing right now is that there’s a lot of people, you know, that want your time and attention, and then you have to turn it all off. I’ve started doing these things where I want my meetings to be in the morning, so I can do that, turn it off, and have these big blocks of studio time. I’m trying to get big blocks of time where I can turn things off. I also have, I’m high masking ADHD. It’s not diagnosed, but it’s diagnosed throughout my family, where I can hyperfocus, but I will also do these things where I like listen to books on tape and podcasts and things, and then I can paint for hours on end. I have these ways of trying to work, but it is really, really, really difficult, too. And I think that a lot of people that don’t make art or write don’t realize what a gargantuan task it actually is to keep making some images that are interesting because we’re bombarded with images. Each one of you, I don’t know how many images or movies or billboards or things, advertisements you see a day, and all of those things are wanting your attention. So, in various ways, that has been studied scientifically. There’s ways of catching your attention. Like, so I think about that, too. Like, who is going to leave their house, come to a museum to see my work? You know what I mean? Like, can I make something that they wanna see? And so, you know, it’s really difficult. That’s really, really difficult to make people inquisitive about a thing or make people wanna show up for it or make people wanna lean in. You know, so I try my hardest to make something that people will ask a question, and then I can tell them, you know, the what I’m thinking about, the subjects I’m thinking about, and inspire them as well. Artists tend to like my work. I don’t know about, I mean, and poets definitely.

– Yeah, poets do.

– But visual artists tend to dig me a little bit. And I have to say, artists are my favorite people, so I am happy about that. I think that artists, we need each other.

– [Heid Erdrich] Mm-hmm.

– More than any like kind of big need of an artist is each other, I think, or like it should be on a T-shirt. Artists just need each other, you know?

– Well, I need you.

– I need you.

– And I need to be able to, you know, be here with you and help, you know, my own thoughts to mature and to be received. You know, it helps a lot when somebody’s thinking along the same things, even though our work looks nothing alike. It just means a lot to me. So thank you for your friendship. I’m excited to see an exhibition that has all my favorite things in one place. So thank you so much, and thanks all of you for listening to us chat away today.