January 16 – February 7, 2025
the (stillness) collective presents Up & BoW, an immersive media installation with video, sound, and movement, originally exhibited as two works “Unfolding Place” and “Bodies of Weather.” This work was filmed at the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area & Shortridge Coastal Center over several intensive retreats from 2021 – 2023.
Total running time 1hr 40min.
Exhibition times TBD, and will be listed here as they are updated.
Details for exhibition events below.
“no matter where we find ourselves – this video installation is, first and foremost, a generous invitation. It beckons the viewer to just … stop. And then it asks us, not insistently but lovingly, to touch into our own innate stillness, to shut off all earthly concerns and just sit, listen, observe and be. The benevolence of this offering is so simple that it can feel suspect and almost hedonistic. But if we allow ourselves to rest there in its (and our own) quietness of soul, we discover not only the intention … but also that a great many things happen during the course of the video.” – Jorge S. Arango, Portland Press Herald
Opening Event | Thursday, January 16, 2025
Location: IMStudio & Coram Library Lobby
- 4:00pm-5:00pm: Astrology Reading with Andrea Goodman
- 5:00pm-7:00pm: Exhibition opening
Closing Event | Friday, February 7, 2025
Location: IMStudio & Coram Library Lobby
- 4:00pm-5:00pm: Artist Talk
- 5:00pm-7:00pm: Closing reception featuring intermittent live music with Robin Lane & Fletcher Boote
About the (stillness) collective
We are a place based interdisciplinary and improvisational collaborative practicing deep listening and intensive making in nature, offering our work in kinship with human and more than human partners along waterways in Midcoast Maine. The (stillness) collective is an iteration of a group that has been gathering and making work since 2015. We arrive, make agreements, and together we listen to place, responding to what we find. We slow into, attune to, attend to, and are directed by whatever happens. We recognize that we exist within a society and culture whose foundation is built on systems of oppression. We practice ongoing relationship, interrelatedness, equanimity, generosity, gratitude, kindness, and slowness in service to the dismantling of those systems. We offer our work toward a vision of reciprocity.
the (stillness) collective core artists:
- Annie Bailey | Visual Artist, Mover
- Fletcher Boote | Interdisciplinary Artist, Vocalist, Healer, Mover
- Susan Bickford | Founding Artist, Producer, Video Editor, Mover, Costume, Installation
- Katherine Ferrier | Fiber Artist, Poet, Mover, Costume, Installation
- Robin Lane | Cellist, Composer, Recording/Audio Engineer
- Heather Lyon | Performance Artist, Costume, Installation
- Luke Myers | Videographer, Editor, Installation
additional artist participants:
- Andrea Goodman | Astrologer, Sound Healer, Vocalist
- Phoebe Parker | Assistant Camera
- Juliette Sutherland | Underwater Camera
- Wesleigh Sterrs | Assistant Camera
- Kariska Pulchalski, Lucy Birkett, Gretta Parsons | Retreat Cooks
- Megan Adams | Writer in Residence
special thanks to:
- Bates IMStudio and Bates College
- Carol Dilley: Professor of Dance, Bates College
- Joseph Hall: Associate Professor of History, Bates College
- Caitlin Cleaver former Director of Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area
- & Shortridge Coastal Center
- This work was sanctioned by Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area
- SPACE Gallery and Executive Director Kelsey Halliday Johnson
- SPEEDWELL Gallery and former director Annika Earley
- The National Endowment for the Arts American Rescue Plan Grant as administered by SPACE Gallery
- Roger Paul | Adjunct Lecturer Wabanaki Language and Culture, University of Maine Orono
- The Upstander Project
- Rich Simon for his constant support of this project
- All of the (stillness) participants since 2015
Land Acknowledgement (courtesy of the artists):
Especially, we have gratitude for this place whom we have come to be in a relationship with.
Sea, sand, sky, wind, weather, rock, birds, rain, Sun, Moon, stars, animals, seals, fish, plants, trees, cherry trees, marsh, river, eagles. For all the more than humans who call this place home. Thank you for holding us in grace with lessons, with challenges, with patience, fears, endurance, joy, pain, thank you for holding it all. We are forever changed for having met you here, and slowed to listen together.
This work was created on the land we now call Maine, the unceded lands of the Wabanaki people. We acknowledge and honor the indigenous people, the original stewards of this land: The Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq-Wolostaqey. The Chuwaponakiyik, the People who live on the land where the sun first looks our way.