2017 Riverside Arts Festival Artsfest_2017_program_final_web | Page 11
N
arrative accounts of human/animal interactions are complex records.
Encounter tales starring animals trend tall. Recollections of brief meetings
between species are frequently spectacular, and carry in them ideas about
humanity and our place in the world. In these tellings, animals are often symbols,
omens, scapegoats, or guides to our wilder selves. Our inability to fully understand
creatures that don’t use the same systems as us (language chiefly, but also gesture and
expression) creates a gap easily filled with conjecture. To meet another creature’s eyes
feels significant, meaningful – “It looked right at me.” Storytelling transforms sightings
with the desires, fears, and imaginings of the narrator, frequently revealing more about
the reporter than the subject.
Wild animals are mysterious and charismatic, they arrest our attention in the moments
we share with them. Animals are indicators of seasonality, abundance (or scarcity),
migration patterns, and changes in the biological condition of an ecosystem. Animal
sightings connect us to the wider environmental web, acting as a gateway to noticing
other subtler natural communities of plants, insects, fungi, rocks, and elements. Falling
in love with a magnificent owl could make you curious about its home, what it eats,
where it sleeps. You might spend more time trying to see one, looking for signs of
its presence, listening for its call, wandering around at dusk. You might see other
secretive, magical things happen when you walk in the woods. This attention can
broaden the knowledge base of how creatures behave and what new pressures act
upon them. If people don’t spend time on the land, ears pricked, eyes scanning, the
environmental memories of previous generations are foreshortened. If comparative
changes in the natural world aren’t recorded and transmitted to a population that sticks
around, there is less cause for alarm when things shift. The baseline of what’s normal in
the natural world shrinks to a few seasons, a few stories.
Artists Leila Armstrong and Lisa Hirmer are spending 6 weeks in Dawson City
collecting stories of animal encounters from locals, tourists, and transients. These
tales will inform the creation of new artworks based on community research and
collaboration. As with any sample, certain themes have already recurred. The recent
appearance of species uncommon to northerly climes has been noted, as has the
necessity of bartering with sassy ravens. In Dawson, bears fall from trees and plastic
deer walk down the main drag. It’s a unique town. These are unique stories.
By teasing out ideas about who we are relative to “nature”, these artists ask
if new rituals can be created to orient ourselves within the natural world.
– Marlaina Buch
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