SALIX is a multimedia installation including 16mm film, sound, and zine about the aliveness of the willow tree and it’s cultural memory and animism throughout time. The 16mm film was shot and written by Torey features sound by LAAMAR and serves as a portrait and poem, an alter, a devotion. The zine, written by Torey and designed by Ian Babineau, includes stories, healing properties, recipes, propagation techniques, and a performance invitation by Miriam Karracker.

The work considers the delicate memories of the tree - how it has been considered a portal to other dimensions, lining cemeteries to ward off the unrested, a liminal tree between land and water, connecting to celestial bodies, a green curtain to hidden deeper knowledge of earth than humans can comprehend.

The work was installed at MIRRORLAB in Minneapolis, Minnesota and generously funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board. It was installed during the pandemic and projected onto the gallery windows with sound speakers outside of the gallery. The zine was free to attendees in a small wood box outside of the gallery.

The film has since been included in Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s FROM THE EARTH Exhibition and Franconia Sculpture Parks’ Franconia Summer Film screening of environmental films as part of the 4Ground Land Art Biennial.

SALIX zine can be purchased at Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis, MN and The Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND.

16MM FILM: TOREY ERIN // POEM: WRITTEN BY TOREY ERIN // SOUND: GEOFFREY LAMAR WILSON (LAAMAR) // ZINE: WRITTEN BY TOREY ERIN // DESIGNED BY IAN BABINEAU // ZINE INVITATION: MIRIAM KARRACKER // FUNDED BY THE MINNESOTA STATE ARTS BOARD ARTIST INITIATIVE GRANT ​​

eeming at Soo Visual Art Center was Torey’s first solo exhibition. Seeming brings together a suite of sculpture, photography, and film portraying contemplations of mortality, the theater of reality, ritual, and temporality.

Torey examines the poetic nature of the physical world with an installation of “ash capsules” or stone urns with bronze cone shaped caps. The urns were drawn from her late grandmother’s ash burial in a curling rock. They are associated with humility, impermanence. “The birds will not even eat us, we are so full of toxins.”

These sculptures, along with photographs of raw silk point to the natural phenomenon of metamorphosis. She creates her own simple imposition of transforming a tree into paper, printing the geolocation of the tree onto the paper, encouraging people to transport themselves to the tree. In the gallery wall there is a peephole with films projected on the inside of the wall for the viewer to see - a window into a dream. A poem scrolls on the monitor in the gallery:

the possibility

that we could die young

was very real

I held a handful of smoke

our sense of separation

fell

away

into a dry world of enormous fluid

body

I spoke to the color yellow and its twin

they began

to breath (two breath)

we will be here for 9 seconds

and I brushedthedeadout of my h air, taking candid

pleasure in sharing the twins illusion

who will tell you

when you are on the wrong

latitude?

Spiraling out

of time

I forgot

all that I have ever written

The notion of objects, subjects, and things ‘becoming’ rather than being, is a major theme throughout the work. The world is breath and all that exists in it is form, closely bound to the structure of the crust.

Torey was inspired to create the contemporary garden project Love Letters from the Earth as part of the 4Ground Land Art Biennial by combining systems thinking and interconnectivity to emotional processing and actionable sustainability. She started by researching perennial pollinator plant species in the region of Fargo, North Dakota. Torey then made handmade seed paper and organized a community event where people gathered together to share their ecological grief and concern about climate change. Together they wrote our gratitude and devotions to Mother Earth on the seed paper and planted it in the garden. It has since grown to support pollinators in the region.

“Love Letters to the Earth is a love practice and actionable gesture that forms connections to the greater web of life by extending our love of earth outward. With the help of many collaborators on this project, I started by researching perennial seed paper native to the region in Fargo, North Dakota, where the garden was planted. With the support of Franconia Sculpture Park and the Plains Art Museum, we found the perfect site for the garden at World Garden Commons within Rabanus Park, a community park project developed by ecological artist Jackie Brookner, including wildlife, wandering paths, storm water basin, and art. The World Gardens Commons demonstrates ecological restoration and socially engaged ecological art and community in relationship dynamics between people, wildlife and the Red River watershed. It was really a dream-come-true to be included in Jackie Brookner’s vision for World Gardens Commons. I hope that the planting can contribute to enriching the Jackie’s concept as well as the biodiversity of the area, albeit petite, and slow growing, every sentiment no matter the scale can help support a loving world. It was beautiful to collaborate with Growing Together Community Gardens, a non-profit organization building community through sustainable agriculture. Jack Wood, Growing Together co-founder, has been an immense help and he and his team will nourish the Love Letters to the Earth garden over time.”

Photography by Ann Arbor Miller.

Special thanks to: Franconia Sculpture Park, Plains Art Museum, Emma Tomb, Kerri Sandve, Kyle Thurston, Henry McGlasson, Growing Together World Gardens, Ann Arbor Miller, and Jack Wood.

To purchase Torey’s zine, Love Letter to the Earth: a social art practice in dissolving ideas of separateness, click here.

I miss most of you is a live video projection for the band More Light featuring Al Church, Don House III, Lars-Erik Larson, Eamonn Mclain, and Dave Simonett.

https://morelight.bandcamp.com/album/casual-dragon

thoughts from the earth is an installation of various stones arranged neatly together in a large circle at Silverwood Park in St. Anthony, Minnesota. Using natural elements from the environment that often can go unnoticed, the installation plays on visibility and invisibility - presenting a way of slow-looking by finding the poetic subtleties and forming new ways of experiencing the world.

During the pandemic and afterwards, the site has been used as a gathering space and for somatic healing practices including tai chi, yoga, meditation, play, and poetry readings.

I see this installation as a meditation on the mysteries of time, cycles, form, action, and belief. Ancient stone circles have been associated with memorializing the dead and were used as places of ritual and healing. Thoughts from the earth is a site for the contemplation of stones as time capsules, showing us a broad cycle of time and impermanence. Stones are dynamic nonlinear systems embedded with information about various epochs, including the Anthropocene - holding traces of wind and movement, and human activity, including atomic weapons tests, pollution, and atmospheric greenhouse gasses. Beyond visible realities there is always a deeper story of activity, labor, belief and achievement that goes unseen. Thoughts from the earth is a contemplation of our impact and participation in a large and beautiful organic system.

Field Experience #12: Impermanence II was a global participatory event during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic organized by Julka Almquist (Field Experience curator) and artists Torey Erin and Peng Wu. Together they invited participants to make temporary sculptures outside and map them for others to find. Here is the map, with participant sculptures created in China, Italy, South America, and more. Map details found here.

Dear Friends,

At the time that we write this, there have been 759,375 covid-19 deaths and protests have been held in over 1700 places throughout all 50 states in the US and internationally after the murder of George Floyd. The past few months have heightened uncertainty for all of us in many different ways

Will our loved ones fall ill to the virus Will we be tear gassed at a protest Will we be harmed by another

Will we be able to pay our bills

Will we ever hug again

The life we all lead is constantly changing moment to moment. It is impermanent - groundless, uncertain, unknown. This impermanence can feel exhilarating, frightening, petrifying. It can make us feel shaky about ourselves and life, as if we are falling through the sky. At times this uncertainty can result in patterns of desire for control, or procrastination, or giving up entirely because of fear that we might fail. It is so human to be in this discomfort. But we invite you to be in it. To allow it by examining that the only thing that is permanent is impermanence.

In the summer of 2018 for Field Experience #12: Impermanence at Deming Heights Park in Minneapolis, a small group of us gathered, set up blankets and books about plants and a tray

of cherries and nuts and chocolate. A giant storm rolled in, the clouds heavy and gray above us, pregnant. We spoke about impermanence, and how flowers and plants are complete, impermanent fragrant sculptures: they are light and life and cycle through seasons and whether storms. They are symbols of loss and grief. Of rebirth, regeneration and growth.

We then prompted the group to play: to walk around the neighborhood and notice and arrange plant material and found objects together to form a small sculpture, perhaps for someone else to discover. Some filled recycled soda cans with weeds and sticks. Some climbed trees and created arrangements for the birds and squirrels. Some created vigils for their loved ones. The storm clouds loomed over our heads as we walked through alleyways and assembled garland on the branches of trees.

We regathered the group and the sun began to set, shifting below the storm clouds. Peng led us in

a sunset practice to let go of the day and embrace the night, and we all stood silently facing the sun as it shifted below the gray clouds reflecting warm peach hues. As moments passed, the wind changed swiftly and it began to pour rain as we said goodbye to one another.

On 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis, the site where George Floyd was murdered, has become a community vigil. Flowers adorn the street and murals of Floyd have been beautifully painted. Throughout Minneapolis people are naturally arranging flowers and cards on sites of burned buildings and rubble, to show signs of communal care and initiate growth and positivity. These sites feel so sacred, a way of grieving as a community.

We invite you and your loved ones to process the idea of impermanence in life and breath, in the wake of a pandemic and uprising. Acknowledging the pain and shakiness of this time, embracing its uncertainty, and grieving the pain can be incredibly healing. We have generated a google map for this event, to archive these sites of arrangements and vigils. Perhaps you come across one, and add it to the map. Or maybe you have the opportunity to make one yourself, and leave it for someone to find. You could even look at the map to go and find an arrangement, to contemplate the gesture of impermanence.

Thanks for being a part of it all.

With love, Torey & Peng

How to find the coordinates of your arrangement on map:

1, Stay at the place where you just placed/found the arrangement. Open Google Map on your phone. Zoom in on the map with two fingers towards the blue dot indicating your location.

2, Place your finger on the blue dot and hold till you see the red pin appear. Now the coordinates will be in the map address box.

3, Copy the coordinates and email us, we will add the site to the customized Google Map we have sent you. If you like, you can send us a description or a photo of the arrangement. We will add that to the map too. However everything on this map will fade away with time, just like the impermanent arrangement in the physical world.

From the Earth is an exhibition at Minneapolis College of Art and Design curated by Melanie Pankau. From the Earth brings together eight artists who explore our intricately-connected relationship to the natural world. Their diverse practices center around the poetic use of terrene materials, interior and exterior places, and how the disengagement with our bodies is linked to the environmental crisis.

The exhibition is inspired by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy’s theory of the “The Great Turning”­— described as an epochal global evolution from the industrial growth society to life sustaining civilization. Macy outlines three dimensions of “The Great Turning”: Holding Actions—activism that slows down the industrial growth society’s damage to the earth; Structural Change—replacing outdated and destructive systems with new structural alternatives; Shift in Consciousness­—the development of the ecological self by cultivating awareness of our non-separateness from the world by acknowledging the earth is our larger body.

The exhibition addresses the question: What is the artist’s role in “The Great Turning?” The artist becomes a visual communicator of these dimensions of transformation by engaging the viewer’s body as a living system through the interconnectivity of materials, encountering our humanness through images of the inner and outer worlds we inhabit, and broadening our perception of time, from short-term thinking to contemplating deep, ecological time.

Participating Artists:

Tom Bierlein

Mira Burack

Torey Erin

Marcella Ernest

Keli Mashburn

Elsa Muñoz

Leah Meridoc Nguyen

Meg Ojala

Torey created analog (and some digital) experimental short films.

Torey went to the St. Croix River in William O’Brien State Park on July 3, 2020 to scope out to film some trees for her film Salix, and happened upon a search and rescue for a boy who went missing in the river. She kept my lens to the search party, hopeful that they would find him alive..but they did not, an hour later they pulled his lifeless little body from the water.

To process the experience and as a memorial to the boy, she maintained a relationship to the site. She went back and created several temporary sculptures with tree bark and twigs, and with ice, whatever was speaking to her in the moment. Most went undocumented. She would get lost with the track of time out there. With the ice memorial, park visitors started to help build the piece and it became a spontaneous group effort, and very magical without knowing the backstory of the memorial.