https://taft-nicholson.utah.edu

Megan Singleton

“In this session participants explored how to transform plants collected from Centennial Valley into site-specific papers and pulp.”

Megan Singleton

“Participants learned the preparation methods of collecting, cooking and beating fiber, followed by western sheet forming techniques.”

Megan Singleton

“Paper pulp is such a versatile media that can be used to make sheets of paper on a book, wrapped around armatures to create sculpture, or cast into the landscape itself.”

Megan Singleton

“Engaging in the paper making process, especially when using local plant fibers, allows people to experience a magical material transformation while learning about plants and a new medium simultaneously.”

Emily Leshner + Nat Castañeda

“This puppet show incorporates elements of toy theater and sensory ethnography as it peeks into the lives of four women whose paths have traversed the land made habitable by the Minidoka Project.”

Emily Leshner + Nat Castañeda

“The story begins in present day and travels back through the decades in which the U.S government encouraged the surveying, sculpting and consumption of western terrain through the U.S. Reclamation Project.”

Minidoka Project, Idaho 1918, Photo from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Emily Leshner + Nat Castañeda

“The women eventually land one hundred years in the past, recreating a moment in which we see four female land surveyors posing for a now recognizable photograph.”

Rosalind Murray

Feeling pressed for time, not only because of climate change and our ongoing loss of biodiversity, but because the River Barrow Track is under threat from a brutal development plan to dig out one of the greatest wildlife corridors in Ireland to install a semi-urban gravel bike, Rosalind Murray shares a survey of her experiences with water in Centennial Valley, and, in the River Barrow in Carlow Ireland, where she grew up.

Rosalind Murray

“When I walk the green path sandwiched between a stream and an endless flow, we are interchangeable, the river, the land, and I. In this place of communion, being of it, it being of me, our boundaries present yet fluid, I frame my artwork. Mapping exists and does not; the two sides of my hippocampus are stimulated, one to find a way in the outside world, the other locating internally as my own consciousness. How can this process unfold within a dominant world policing boundaries between self and outside to the point of destruction?”

Rae Wynn-Grant

Although the American black bear (Ursus americanus) is a common species throughout North

America, the relationships between humans and black bears throughout North America's dynamic

history has never been collected. As the beginning of a larger, curated writing project, Dr. Rae Wynn-

Grant details the complicated history and present of humans and black bears in the Western Great Basin, where bears are reemerging after extirpation.

Trudi Lynn and Krista Caballero

Studies for Making and Unmaking brings together digital and analogue projections and performances, curved and pulled by gusting winds, the squeak of technological breakdown, and the distortion of projections on paper.

Toni Wynn

“In this session participants explore poems alluding to water that speak to the history of the land. As an example, “Where does flow find us?” We could tell real or imagined history of migration/crossing water.¨

Carmina Sanchez-Del-Valle

“This is a proposal to consider the meaning of vastness in the location where the Mapping Meaning 2018 workshop takes place. It involves considering how much space we occupy, how much more space we demand that is not visible and local, and the many creatures that we displace when we claim space for our exclusive use.”

Carmina Sanchez-Del-Valle

“Participants will consider contemporary expectations of dwelling, and will acknowledge the varied and contrasting meanings of dwelling, inhabiting, and sheltering when we are at home. What is to say that the Centennial Valley is home to migratory birds? How different or similar is it from saying it is the home of the Taft-Nicholson Center, or the ancestral home of the Nez Perce?”

Carmina Sanchez-Del-Valle

“The workshop asks participants to survey a piece of land - to measure a territory using string and bodies, and to document its contents. To compare the measured periphery of basic forms of sedentary and nomadic historical forms of habitation.”

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

“I am at the research stage of “How to build a wall and other ruins”- a 2-channel video installation that references and appropriates the YouTube how-to video format to investigate: 1) labor and its documentation; 2) the integration of theory and practice; and 3) the intersection of documentary, ethnographic and performance-based filmmaking.

For Mapping Meaning I will stage a participatory performance on-site in Montana. Together, we will build a wall using appropriated instructions from a youtube video. The performance will serve as an experimental, experiential performance that will be developed into a finished piece.”

Annita Lucchesi

“This interactive workshop will be an opportunity to learn and engage in narrative mapping, by utilizing cartography as a medium with which to grapple with understanding of place, connection to land, and  representational practices in conveying land-based knowledge and stories. Participants will then work in mapping exercises that allow them to utilize their own skills, personal experiences, and narratives to create a collection of maps reflecting on the land and space we occupy. These exercises will provide an interdisciplinary space to share technical and artistic skills, scholarly considerations, and engagements with the land, and collectively experiment with new means of conveying such explorations.”