On Being a Porous Boundary
November 19, 2024, 5:30-7:00 pm
Event details
November 19, 2024
Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark
Event description
Join Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative in person at the opening reception for On Being a Porous Boundary. Reception will be followed by facilitated reflective writing and discussion. (Narrative Medicine Workshop participants do not need to arrive promptly at 4:00, but do allow enough time to be with the artwork before the workshop begins at 6:00).
On Being a Porous Boundary features immersive paintings, bodily ceramic sculpture, and monumental paper sculpture by Catherine Fairbanks, and intimate poetry by Catherine Barnett, which has been hand-drawn for the exhibition by Nuria Kiesebrink-Pareick. We construct and reconstruct boundaries in order to protect ourselves, to relate to others, to move into and through the world, and for the world to move around and through us. We are, ourselves, volumes of porous boundaries. What does care look like in this context? How do we care for ourselves, for those in our immediate orbit, for strangers? How and when might we choose to hold strangers closely? What amount of fierceness or tenderness is necessary? What seeps through?
Featured artists: Catherine Fairbanks uses empathy as a foundational structure to bridge her dual practices as an artist and a nurse. In both roles, she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein, for whom empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference in the other. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality and liberation. Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf) and Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection). She received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. uses empathy as a foundational structure to bridge her dual practices as an artist and a nurse. In both roles, she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein, for whom empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference in the other. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality and liberation. Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf) and Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection). She received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions.
Facilitators
Daena Goldsmith, Ph.D., is a professor of Rhetoric & Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College, where she researches and teaches about how we enact identities and relationships through what we say and how we say it. Her work focuses on interactions from everyday life, including the conversations we have with a spouse or partner, the advice we give to friends and family, and the stories we tell face-to-face and online. Her research has examined how couples talk about lifestyle change in the wake of a cardiac episode, how couples support one another when one partner is treated for cancer, and how mothers of autistic children tell their stories. Additional information is available at daenagoldsmith.com.
Alexis Rehrmann is a writer, editor, and storyteller in Portland, Oregon who has incorporated elements of Narrative Medicine throughout much of her writing. Her journalistic work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Portland Monthly Magazine, and PDX Parent. She’s co-written a memoir of trauma (not her own), and is currently co-writing a memoir about masculinity (also not her own). She has performed her stories onstage at events including BackFencePDX and The Interstitium. Alexis studied theater directing at N.Y.U and recently completed a 5-year stint in corporate digital and social media content marketing. She is currently working towards her Narrative Medicine Certificate through Columbia University. She is the chair of the NWNMC Communications Committee.