Loss / Grief / Mourning

Loss/Grief/Mourning Edition 1

Art is often used as a form of therapy and coping. As tragedy and struggle is faced and experienced, artists of all creeds and media use creation to process. This interdisciplinary collection will attempt to bring together this multiplicity of artistic expression through this shared coping mechanism of general creation. This collection will chronicle all parts of initial loss, of the grieving process, of eventual acceptance.

Featured Artists: Yesi Avila-Cortez Samantha Greene Giovanna Lomanto Jane Ann McKay Arianna Williamson

Curated by: Jane Ann McKay

Yesi Avila-Cortez Most of Yesi's artwork deals with loss, grief, mental health, and portraiture. Despite the artwork depicting or referring to stages of her own mental health, she hope viewers will be able to find something of themselves in the work that makes them reflect upon their own lives.

Yesi Avila-Cortez is an artist based in Napa Valley. She will soon complete her BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. Her artwork has been featured several times in the Napa Valley College Gallery as well as the Worth Ryder Gallery at UC Berkeley. She has work published in the 2018 Jessamyn West Writing Book and in the 2021 Mosiac Art and Literary Journal 60th Edition.

@yyesseyy

Self-Haunting Series 1

Self-Haunting Series 2

Self-Haunting Series 3

"Hidden Llorona"

Sad Series 5 "Disassociation"

Samantha Greene Seen here are selections from a series of photograph weavings that were ultimately sewn into a quilt in a project entitled "A House With No One In It". After spending the better part of a year in a house belonging to her late great-great aunt and uncle who she had never met, Samantha contended with the tensions in knowing the most intimate details of someone’s life without having ever met them.

Working with photos recovered from that house, Samantha explores grief and mourning, closeness and admiration, the notion of home, and the act of bearing witness to memories that are not her own.

Samantha Greene is a sculpture artist originally from San Diego, California. She is a student at UC Berkeley that will graduate with bachelor’s degrees in art practice and sociology. She works as a teaching artist to help empower the next generation through creativity centered around social justice. Samantha does cool things sometimes, but mostly she’s just trying her best to figure it all out.

Giovanna Lomanto In these poems, Giovanna Lomanto grapples with the ways that language can represent (or, alternatively, the ways that language fails to represent) grief. In the year following her grandfather’s passing in January of 2020, Lomanto wrote about the mourning process extensively— specifically, what questions and emotions haunt her. The haunting, however, is not a negative comment on the ghost; rather, it is a celebration of memory and a longing to create more of them.

Giovanna Lomanto is a California native hailing from the suburbs around Sacramento. As a poet and teaching artist, she is deepening her artistic practice by teaching and learning from students in programs at Chapter 510 and SPARC poetry. She is graduating from her undergraduate career in English at the University of California, Berkeley and will be attending NYU’s Low-Residency MFA program in Paris. Her published works are featured in various literary journals, and she has published two collections of poetry, no body in particular (Scrambler Books, 2019) and jupiter fell out the sky last night (Bound to Brew, 2021).

https://linktr.ee/ giovanna_lomanto

screwdriver woodchips in my nose, some concrete drying in the backyard. ask where i've been and i remember the way that home depot dotted the aisle with paint samples, and i never thought i would walk into the hardware store and cry unambiguous and undeterred by an undulation i toggle between the controls, laugh when i watch you pour cold water on soaked soil and when they show up and ask you you why i'm leaky i

tell them i'm scared of the breathless. you were past tense, are present tense, live in a vague future tense unbeknownst to the orange aprons and we play piano together, i do the right hand, you do the left and treble/bass rings through the strings in the morning shadow of a smiting spite (i hate getting locked out when i grab the mail). i then proceed to declare the word in threefold: you you you—

three times to make it holy and sanctify the pronoun with a sort of sacramental sacramento tone, like the one time that the dim sum lady asked if we wanted chicken feet and i watched her reach for t he steamer basket before you even said yes. saw the bones stretching over the skin and suckled, missed the way we would hold it like a sacrificial lamb and pray. went to home depot once and tried to rent a truck but the man at the counter said we needed our insurance card and i thought of how you would have always had that, and in the absence i missed you you you. i smelled the sawdust and cried again looking at the paint samples.

fireworks you used to always say full stop. drove your car up and down the berkeley hills. did you see that? spark in the distance on the fifth of july and you can't hear me yell over all that racket, so i stand there, hills and all, and i open my maw for the sacrament of reconciliation, back of the pew kind of confession whisper/scream mood in that old cathedral. wonder what it means to pray it all away. sometimes i hear your laughter in the beams. that car broke down twice and we locked the doors manually that morning we went to fix the battery. your bed still smells like you when i close my eyes. synesthesia tastes like the slow plod of your flat feet up the stairs and if you think about it hard enough, you'll find the old bookshelf you built for me. cut on the pinky finger, slam of the car trunk to seep and squeeze. achy, that one.

bible study always did have an inclination for origins, and the exception is a skeptic concept of degeneration that seems to hunker down on us in the late months. winter is the most arduous month and the cold hallways of your labyrinthian hospital room sank into the back legs of the chairs we cried on, leaving the room to talk about you without you hearing us utter imminence. genesis is one of my favorite references in paradise lost, mostly because we would

read it on summer mornings, when the months were windy and the mornings were gentle. now i wake to a hard start and stutter out of bed closer to noon, and i even forget to open my windows on some of the dreary days. i sing you a lullaby, and i hope for rest.

Jane Ann McKay In this series McKay chronicles the loss and grieving process after the death of her father in the summer of 2020, and the complex relationships he left behind as a troubled alcoholic with manic depression and bipolar disorder. These poems and subsequent illustrations chronicle the haunting of Michael McKay as his ashes sit unscattered in the back seat of the family car.

Jane is a painter, illustrator, and writer originally from Lakeside, California. She is a soon to be graduate of the class of 2021 at UC Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice. She has served a residency at the New York Academy of Art, as a director for the arts education organization CREATE, and is featured in "Commemoration of 2020" at the Worth Ryder Gallery. She has worked with CutItOut Magazine in illustration and has a collaborative mural up in the Public Service Center on the UC Berkeley Campus.

McKay is currently living and working in the San Francisco East Bay.

https://linktr.ee/Harpsflame @harps.art

"We've Had His Ashes in the Backseat For a Year" Page 1

"We've Had His Ashes in the Backseat For a Year" Page 3

"We've Had His Ashes in the Backseat For a Year" Page 4

"We've Had His Ashes in the Backseat For a Year" Page 14

"We've Had His Ashes in the Backseat For a Year" Page 15

Arianna Williamson Within this body of work Arianna Williamson will use her practice as guidance for healing from grief and loss of a matriarch in her life. Her process will include personal research on grieving in hopes of stabilizing an abstract response to an abstract question: what does one do after the loss? “Grief Baking” is a digital video narrative which attempts to provide meaning to the question above. The documentation follows matrilineal life and loss through a learned combination of yeast, flour, salt, and water.

Arianna Williamson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho who has spent the majority of her life in the California, Bay Area. In 2021, she will receive a Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. Williamson’s art practice focuses on abstract and representational painting and drawing, video narratives, poetry, and social practice.

She has already been included in various exhibitions including “Paradigm Shift” at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery at the University of California, Berkeley, “Then and Now: Art from Childhood to the Present” at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, CA, and “Making Their Mark: Student Painting Exhibition” at the Mahoney Library Gallery in Petaluma, CA. Williamson currently lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

ariannawilliamson.com @arianna_mae_

“Grief Baking”

By Arianna Williamson What does one do after the loss?

“When I lost my brother, I still met with him many times in my dreams”, she told me assuredly, leaning against the stone wall in front of our small, teal apartment. Soaking in the winter sun, my eyes welled with tears. How was I to know that she would meet me in dreams only a few years later?

Yeast is a live, single-celled organism. Yeast is alive. Alive becomes an abstract space when you’re finally aware of its opposite. There are about 160 species of Yeast but I am most aware of its form in little, paper packets. Tiny, beige granules, placed in dormancy, I eagerly await the moment in which Yeast meets the warm water. Their explosive connection is alive. Life, all at once, is reactivated when they reunite.

A few months after her passing, I woke up from the sound of my own voice. She met me in a dream, in a place that is frequently indescribable, and yet, her skin was real enough to touch, her hair was strong enough to be brushed, her eyes bright enough to be seen, her voice clear enough to say, “If I could hold you, I would jump into your arms.” I awoke to an indescribable world. I was angry and upset. I wished she had held me.

I could not see how we had been reactivated.

This year, baking bread has proven to be quite a popular hobby within pandemic life and to me, that was no exception. Martin Phillip, a baker at the Vermont-based King Arthur Flour, stated our need for bread as, “We’re going back to the instinct of caregiving, and the instinct to bring community closer to us, and bread is the center of that.” If bread is at the center of care, then Yeast must be as well. Remember, Yeast is alive and that lived experience is not one of single-celled individualism but of intergenerational collaboration.

Although each organism is made up of just one cell, Yeast exists as a collaborative being. Inside every little, paper package and every risen dough lives a Mother cell. She guides the process of bread-baking through and through. She drinks the water I give her, eats the flour I feed her, contributes her breath to each loaf but, her job transcends beyond the dough. She teaches me how to hold a whisk, spins me through the kitchen in song, and always ties my apron on just right.

She frequently grabs my aching heart at a floured table with her strong memories and my damp eyes. Bread is our collaboration. Kneading dough is when I see her hands on my own. Our hands at work.

I understand it more now. A comforting and upsetting axis of reactivation.

A Mother cell grows a “bud”, a protrusion that evolves until it is the same size as herself, called a Daughter cell. The Daughter cell can also split herself so that the process may repeat until, in just a mere number of hours, a single loaf of bread has generated an expansive matriarchial history. Their life together transcends anything which can be seen by the human eye. Lifetimes of stories, meals, and breaths experienced in a swiftness only few can imagine. A history that exists as quickly as the Mother Cell is reborn and the Daughter cell is left to grieve.

Yeast will not be victorious against a contact with fire.

A lifetime of memories feels like nearly nothing when everything comes down to that final hour.

I know now that grief never stops baking; I've just learned to distinguish the flames. Flames will give you bread but also, death. Flames will give you memories but also, grief. Flames will give you pain but also, love. Flames will take away people but leave you with dreams.

So what does one do after the loss?

I am the Daughter of a Mother cell. As long as I exist, we will reactivate.

"Grief Baking" (2020) By Arianna Williamson Video youtu.be/CJtiT76DBIE

"Baking with Grandma"

"Mom Bakes with Grandma"

Screenshots from "Grief Baking" Video

This Collection was illustrated and curated by Jane Ann McKay for the Worth Ryder Gallery. McKay is a Lakeside, San Diego born artist working in the San Francisco Bay area. She has worked in curating prior shows such as "Escapism '21" and "What is the new Futurism?". https://linktr.ee/Harpsflame @harps.art 2021