In the winter of 2012, Playa became home to its first composers—Keane Southard and Karl Cronin. We were curious about how Playa’s salient features—its remoteness, its vastness, its wind and birds and mountains and solitude—would affect the music that was written here, so we asked them to tell us about it.

Keane Southard, from Massachusetts, arrived mid-January and had this to say about his month at Playa:

“Being at Playa, around such beauty, within such vastness, helped me to slow down in my routine tasks and gave me something to ponder and the time to do just that. I started meditating for the first time in my life, and every time I looked out the window onto the ever-changing landscape I got a boost in happiness/wonderment that fueled my ability to work. I often think about where I am geographically and in relation to things, and I’d never spent so much time in so remote a location.

“While at Playa I wrote the entire middle movement of my Piano Concerto, and I wanted to (and I think I did succeed) create something simple yet very beautiful. I am only now realizing that this may have been, probably at least partly, influenced by the beautiful environment at Playa, but there is really no way of knowing for sure.”

Karl Cronin came in March, from San Franciso, when the wind blew steadily and powerfully. He says: “I am a composer with a rather ambulatory process for finding my music. I begin by listening. I listen to my skin tingling with warmth or cold. I listen to the pulse of my heartbeat. My listening then reaches into my environment. To the trees. To the man-made things. To the stones.

“I have friends that aid my listening. Friends that activate my surroundings. Wind is one of my dearest friends, and was a trusty companion during my residency at Playa. The sheer volume of sound that roared through the trees just past the chicken coop will remain in my memory forever.

“I am friends with the birds. The birds at Playa were particularly helpful allies in the process of making music. Each day they sang the melodic dictionary. They also sang to me the contours of space, placing me on the map. The Sand Hill Cranes trumpeted their arrival from places far, far away. They remained in residence throughout the month of my residence. Their commitment to each other inspired me to commit to my work.

“To be so small in a land so vast. How do you render that in sound? How low would we have to tune the contrabasses to mirror a fraction of the high desert’s profundity? Oddly enough, alone in my cabin, so far from my life in San Francisco, I found that electronic sounds could be used to approximate and suggest vastness in ways I had not encountered with acoustic instrumentation. This came as a shock to me, yet it is precisely the kind of discovery that can be made when you strip back obligations and are allowed to be fully engaged with your work for days on end.

“I was attracted to Playa because of the solitude I knew I would find there. It provided the perfect context to complete the score of my song cycle The Wild Men – a tale of a man who gets lost in the woods and is forced to confront his own animal nature. I was able to let my mind drift deeply into his world. I could live into his reality. In the end I found a sound I wasn’t anticipating at all. It is smoky. Somewhat jazzy. It is sparse. It is filled with strings. And it feels absolutely right for this work. I have Playa to thank for the sound I found. For brokering my relationship with a landscape so powerful, so full of mystery.

“The places that shape us are embedded in our work. If you hear me sing of wind in future songs, you’ll know which wind I’m referring to.”

 For a free copy of the The Wild Men and to hear early samples, visit http://karlcronin.com/music-3/opera/

…………………….
David Licata, a filmmaker and writer from New York, brought his guitar to Playa and decided to leave it there, donating it for the use of future residents. We asked him about his music, and he said this:

“I’m not a composer, and I don’t really play improvised music. I have a repertoire that I practice and sometimes perform; I play guitar as a way to step away from the writing and film work. Early on during my stay at Playa I played occasionally in the Common’s loft space, above the kitchen, in the late afternoon. No reason other than I wanted to get out of my studio.

“One day Barbara was cooking and the smell of sauteed onions and garlic transported me to 1981 and my parents’ house. I would play in my room on the second floor for four to six hours a day (I wanted to be classical guitarist then) and my mother would be downstairs, cooking. It was a powerful reliving of the experience–more than a memory–and so from then on I made a point of practicing in the loft, late in the afternoon, on the days when Barbara was cooking. It was something I would never expect to happen at a residency, or anywhere else, for that matter. Just a sliver of magic served up nice and warm.”

Finite Foto’s Melanie McWhorter interviewed Terri Warpinski on her project, Surface Tension, combining images from the borders of the US/Mexico and in the Middle East. Above: Surface Tension/US-­‐Mexico: Surveillance. Copyright Terri Warpinski

Terri Warpinski was a resident at Playa in Fall 2011. An excerpt from the interview:

At the time I began in earnest to edit the color work I was participating in a month long residency program called Playa in central Oregon. There, through deep and long conversations with my fellow fellows – the writers, scientists and artists also in the program – I came to see that forging direct connections between pictures was a useful strategy. It asserts relationships between images, both formal and conceptual, that combine to engage the viewer with the content in a manner that is more expansive and layered than I can achieve with a single frame.

Click Surface Tension to read the interview and view images. Finite Foto is a new media collective that investigates and promotes the intersection of photography and culture in the state of New Mexico.

Artmaking with 7^th and 8^th Graders at Paisley School

On April 23 and 24, 2012, Nancy Pobanz, an artist in residence at Playa’s Residency Program in Summer Lake, volunteered to work on a project with eight students comprising the 7^th and 8th grade at Paisley School.

Pobanz, who lives and works on her art in Eugene, grew up in the high desert in Ontario. She collects most of her art materials from found and reused items including rocks, sagebrush, grass, leaves, charcoal from forest fire burns and tea bags. Her works are landscapes created from theses mixed media.

Pobanz demonstrated to the students how she selects rocks from the area that she represents in her paintings, crushes the rock by hand with a mortar and pestle, and then creates a powder by finely mulling the fragments of rock. She showed the students how the rock powder pigment could be rubbed onto paper by hand, or mixed with water and spread onto paper, or mixed with gum Arabic and painted onto paper.

Students practiced these various techniques and were asked to find and bring in a rock or rocks the following day to be made into pigment.  The students brought in a range of rocks from dark grey to light orange, crushed their finds with mortar and pestle and created a palette of powders from mulling the fragments. Then they explored creating elements of a high desert landscape with their pigments and charcoal that resulted in stunning works of art.  -Article and photos by Kris Norris, Playa Site Manager.

New Paintings by David Carmack Lewis, including new work from a February-March 2012 residency at Playa, open at Portland’s Attic Gallery, 102 S.W. First Ave., on May 3, 6-9 pm., and continue through May 28.

Lewis’ paintings are meditations on the dark. By exploring the limited spectrums of various light sources and how they compete with the darkness, he reveals a dramatic tableau of narrative potential.

http://davidcarmacklewis.com/  &  http://carmackart.blogspot.com/

Artwork:  Constellation, oil on canvas  60″w x 33″h

To celebrate its first full year of fellowship residents, Playa will host its first Open House on Saturday, May 5, 1-4 p.m. Since May 2011, Playa has welcomed 59 writers, artists, and scientists from the U.S. and Canada for residency stays of two weeks to two months.

During the Open House, visitors are invited to tour the facility’s grounds and studios and to gather at the Commons for refreshments.

At 2 p.m., archaeologist Michael Rondeau will show slides and present a guest lecture, “The Peopling of the New World,” about recent research that challenges the Clovis-first model of human habitation. Rondeau, a lithics expert from Sacramento, will be spending his April-May fellowship residency at Playa working with Dr. Dennis Jenkins to analyze lithics from Paisley Caves. He is also on the faculty of the Northern Great Basin Prehistory Project’s Archaeology Field School, summer 2012.

The event also launches Playa’s summer season and the beginning of its Contributing Residency program. In addition, April-May are prime months to view the migrating flocks of waterfowl–including plumaged ducks, geese, and swans–and the songbirds passing through the Summer Lake area.  Lodging and camping are readily available in the area.

Image: Pre-Clovis projectile point, Paisley Caves

Playa|Presents, Wednesday, April 4, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Featuring the open studios and displays of Fellowship Residents, the event will conclude with readings in the Commons, with refreshments served.  At Playa, 47531 Highway 31, 
Summer Lake, Lake County, Oregon 97640.

Residents at Playa through April 6 include: Karl Cronin, San Francisco, music/movement; Donna Henderson, Monmouth OR, poetry; Rob Licht, Jacksonville NY; sculpture/drawing; Donna Crispin, Eugene, fibers; Irene Zabytko, Apopka, FL, fiction; Liz Tran, Seattle, painting; David Memmott, La Grande OR, fiction; & Michelle Acuff, Walla Walla WA, installation. Click for Profiles 

Image:  Ron Licht in studio at Playa, pointing the way, March 2012. (Click on the image for an expanded view.)

What’s it like to spend one month at Playa? Our eight January-February fellowship residents answered a survey soon after they left, and their responses give a glimpse into the experience.

Scot Siegel said he was “totally blown away” when he first arrived. He was referring to Playa’s setting and facilities, but painter and sculptor Jamie Newton had to change plans for some of his outdoor pieces, for fear they would literally “end up on the other side of the lake”!

Although the weather can’t be controlled, many residents marveled at how well-organized everything else at Playa was. Solitude is a key component, but with a late-afternoon snack, a weekly community dinner, and impromptu activities such as visiting a nearby geothermal hot springs or a high school basketball game, Playa manages to “inspire community without forcing it upon the artists,” wrote filmmaker and writer David Licata.

Composer Keane Southard appreciated the chance to “explore a new environment, and meet and learn from other interesting artists.”

M.E. Hope described the interaction this way: “I read a play so the playwright could hear it, I watched a film with the filmmaker, I listened to music just composed, I heard poems as they were being born, I saw art forming right beside me. I listened to owls and stars at 3AM. I learned the many voices of the wind. I ate good food, learned about the people and the land of Summer Lake and Lake County, I was able to sleep and read and walk without thinking you have something else you need to get done.”

John Martin found that Playa provided “a time of deep introspection at the same time as being a ‘charmed’ place outside my normal life.” Being freed of commitments seemed especially sweet to writer Terry Brix, who noted, “First time ever I got up in the morning and thought about poetry and writing instead of engineering and business.“

Kumani Gantt saw inspiration all around her, writing, “The physical environment was astoundingly beautiful and was my daily muse.” And Scot Siegel, who admits he thought he might be “roughing it” at Playa, put it this way: “Each day I would go on an unplanned hike, meet new ghosts, and lose track of time. The wind, coyotes, owls, hawks, eagles, moths, and many heard but unseen creatures kept me company through the night.”

Many residents have websites and blogs that talk in more detail about their residency and show samples of their work:
- Jamie Newton shows a great selection of work and photographs from his residency on his website including the photo, above, his studio prepare for the Playa|Presents studio tour, February 8.
- David Licata’s blog explores the humor and homesickness of a residency (don’t miss his photo essay of the birdhouses of Playa).
- Scot Siegel’s blog includes this great observation about Playa: “I felt like an astronaut there, and I mean that in the best sense of the word.”)
- And in this post by composer Keane Southard, he includes a poem he was inspired to write at Playa, and a painting that Jamie Newton made in response.

Playa|Presents, Wednesday, March 7, 4 – 6 p.m.

Featuring the open studios and displays of Fellowship Residents, the event will conclude with readings in the Commons, with refreshments served.  At Playa, 47531 Highway 31, 
Summer Lake, Lake County, Oregon 97640.

Residents at Playa through March 9 include:  , Prescott AZ, Fiction; Jayne Marek, Greenwood IN, Fiction/creative nonfiction; Ruby Murray, Cathlamet WA, Essay/Fiction; Rob Licht, Jacksonville NY, Sculpture; David Lewis, Portland, Painting; Sonja Hinrichsen, San Francisco, Video installation; and David Licata, Film/Writing, New York City.

Click for Profiles 

Image:  A Sonja Hinrichsen, “Snow Drawing” from a recent project in Colorado, January 2012. (Click on the image for an expanded view.)

Playa has awarded three additional fellowship residencies for the winter/spring sessions, which began January 16 and continue through May 4.  Artist Liz Tran is from Seattle, writer David Memmott is from La Grande, and visual/movement/recording artist and composer Karl Cronin is from San Francisco. Karl Cronin’s residency is coordinated by ecoartspace. (Image: still from Cronin’s Hunter of Peace)

They will join 25 other writers, artists, and scientists from throughout the U.S. who are at Playa  for stays of one- to two-months. Profiles all 28 residents are posted under the Residents tab at Residents-2012

Jamie Newton, a Portland artist who completed a fellowship residency at Playa earlier this month, will be showing in March at the Hanson Howard Gallery in Ashland with an  opening on Friday, March 2, 5-8pm. He says he expects to be showing some of the work produced at Playa as well as a number of other things. To the right: thirty-six views of summer lake.

Nancy Pobanz, a resident at Playa, May-June 2011, reports, “I have been able to devise a way to work with water-based media in layers – and am thrilled with the results.  This piece (illustrated,  6″x6″) uses charcoal from the 2002 forest fire and earth from the Summer Lake bed as well as walnut ink and oak gall ink that I make from walnuts and oak galls that I gather in the Willamette Valley.”

In March 2012, White Lotus Gallery in Eugene will present “Stormy Writings”, a solo show of recent work.  The opening reception is March 10.  In her artist statement for the show she says, “This new work responds to the atmospheric conditions that are constantly changing over the expansive Summer Lake and over my personal life.  Watching stormy weather approach and pass over the remote, wide-open, minimal landscape affects me and reflects me deeply.” Nancy will return to Playa in April for a second month-long residency.