SKEW LINES - a residency and installations by Heid E. Erdrich and Rosy Simas

SooVAC is pleased to invite you to SKEW LINES by Heid E. Erdrich and Rosy Simas, the last iteration of Collab at SooVAC. Over the past nine months, artists of different disciplines collaborated at SooVAC with public programming. Seneca choreographer and artist Rosy Simas and writer/text-image artist Heid E. Erdrich, Ojibwe, will be in residence creating work in the gallery throughout the month of May. With a closing reception on May 25th to reveal their final installations. All of the Collab projects are supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The gallery will be open during the residency so visitors can see the space as it evolves. 

Both artists engage moving image and text to create poetic works for performance and installation. During May, Simas and Erdrich will explore shared interests that arise from research and experimentation with media, textiles, and objects. 

Erdrich's installations will center around female ancestors from Anishinaabe/Ojibwe and other Nations as well as Metis from Manitoba, Canada. Simas will install films and props from her recent work Weave, as well as a paper representation of her research into her diplomatic ancestors back to 1650. 

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The two artists, who have worked together on Rosy Simas’ recent projects Skin(s) and Weave, began collaborating when Erdrich produced Artifact Traffic, a performance and exhibit at Intermedia Arts five years ago. During the SooVAC residency, Erdrich and Simas will also host a gathering to record an important conversation between women artists in the Twin Cities Native American community.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Heid E. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. As writer and filmmaker, she has collaborated with Rosy Simas Danse since 2014 including writing for Skins and co-creating the short film Skin Frequencies. Heid is author of nine books, including the recent poetry collection Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media and Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes which was a 2014 City Pages Top Food Book. Heid edited the recent New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Heid's awards include two Minnesota Book Awards, the 2018 Native Arts and Cultures Fund National Fellowship, three Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and the Loft-McKnight Fellowship in prose. She works as an educator, interdisciplinary artist, and independent visual arts curator. Heid has collaborated with visual artists on award-winning poem videos and animations created with an all-indigenous crew. Her most recent book incorporates her poem videos via QR codes. Heid teaches in the Augsburg University Low-residency MFA program. More about Heid E. Erdrich. 

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Rosy Simas (director/choreographer) is a Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Heron Clan) artist based in Minneapolis. Her choreographic work investigates how culture, history and identity are stored in the body and expressed in movement. For more than 20 years she has created work dealing with a wide range of political, social and cultural subject matter from a Native feminist perspective.Simas has been honored by the Native community with a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship (2013), a First Peoples Fund Fellowship (2016), and residencies at the Banff Centre Indigenous Arts Program, All My Relations Arts, Full Circle's Talking Stick Festival, and Institute of American Indian Arts' Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. In addition, Simas is a Guggenheim (2015) and McKnight (2016) Choreography Fellow. More about Rosy Simas.