Jenny Asarnow started making radio stories at Brown Student Radio; one of her earliest projects was a conversation with the automated voice on the Amtrak hotline. She’s been a talk show producer at KUOW Public Radio and reported for national programs including NPR’s Snap Judgement and PRI’s The World. Asarnow created “The Corner: 23rd and Union,” a hyper-local documentary about race and class in Seattle’s Central District that invited neighbors to share stories on a toll-free hotline. She currently co-manages KUOW’s youth media education program, RadioActive. A participant in The Long Walk 2011, she returns this year to create a series of audio stories/confessionals of people living and working near the Sammamish River Trail.
Zack Bent is a Seattle based artist. His sculptures, photographs and videos are often mythic translations of his home, his family and the stuff he collects. Bent received degrees in architecture and environmental design from Ball State University and an MFA in photography from the University of Washington. Recent exhibitions of his work have included venues such as PDX Contemporary (Portland), Crawl Space Gallery (Seattle), Winston Wächter Gallery (Seattle), University of Calgary (Alberta CA) along with video screenings at the Weisman Museum of Art, The Banff Center, and MVMA Fest (Marfa TX). He will be presenting a new sculptural installation in collaboration with musicians Jessika Kenny and Eyvind Kang at the Mid-Point Mash-Up.
Bicycle Choir is a group of Seattle-based women (hailing from projects including the Infernal Noise Brigade, Circus Contraption, Dunava, the Esoterics, and Seattle Pro Musica) who formed to revive the once-commonplace tradition of casual communal singing and music-making in their homes, communities, and adventures. The choir’s members proclaim a variety of formal and informal musical backgrounds, and bring a far-ranging collection of secularized spirituals, story-songs, Bulgarian harmonies, early American shapenote music, and drinking tunes to train tunnels, bike-repair shops, backyards, and other unusual gatherings and celebrations. They welcome singing along.
Webster Crowell is an award winning filmmaker working primarily in stop-motion animation. Largely self-taught, he constructs highly tactile worlds full of idealized characters and romantic detritus in a frenetic mix of styles and speeds. His recent venture, Under Pressure Seltzer Works, a bicycle-driven seltzer delivery operation. Once ubiquitous, Seltzermen vanished in most cities during the 20th century, replaced by disposable bottles and impersonal supermarkets. Starting in 2009, Web began collecting antique bottles and equipment from seltzer services across the country, meeting the people who still provide this effervescent service in New York, San Francisco and other cities. The seltzer trade provides a gleeful escape from the confines of the animation studio, and combines Web’s love of sustainable business and antiquity. His refreshing libations will be delivered to The Long Walk participants along their route. The exchange will be captured on film.
The Snoqualmie Floodplain Cabaret performs unique musical theater, placing hilariously incongruous sets of doo woo, jive, country,and popular songs from the 40s, 50s, and 60s into various outdoor settings. Originally formed in 1995 as a performance troupe at Glacier National Park, Montana, The Cabaret has since unburdened itself from the straight expectations of hotel tourists, allowing for epic bouts of unpolished emotion, seemingly uncalled-for props, improbable segues, pianos hoisted into trees, spontaneous fits of landscaping, tight harmonies, and javelin throwing.
Jed Dunkerley, Dayton Allemann, Annastasia Workman, Sari Breznau, Steve Weiss, Dan Akre, Scott Hamann, Amy LaRubbio, Amber Duimstra, Cheryl Roorda will perform at the Mid-Point Mash-Up.
Jim Demetre is an art critic and gardener who lives in Seattle. He was the publication manager of the legendary non-profit Northwest art journal Reflex and was the publisher and editor of the print magazine Aorta and the online Artdish. His visual art and dance reviews have been published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, theStranger and the Seattle Weekly. He is also a landscape designer and plant historian with a particular interest in the specific cultural role of plant species in human history. He participated in The Long Walk 2011 and has been talking about it ever since. This year, he is contributing to Eric Steen’s project Beers Made by Walking and to The Long Walk’s Survival Guide.
Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer whose work is about the persistent call of wanderlust and the constantly shifting search for home. Tessa thinks best while in motion, and she spent the past year riding her bike across the United States before heading off to work in Antarctica. She is now happily settling back into Seattle and plans to stay for the foreseeable future. Tessa considers this attempt at stationary life to be her most ambitious adventure yet. Tessa is contributing to The Long Walk’s Survival Guide.
Illicit Jug Cartel was born out of love for the plethora of amazing and diverse jug bands that played the night away on many a porch, vaudeville and dance halls and barns in the early 20’s and 30’s. The Jug Cartel is made up of Gus Clark (Guitar and Vocals) and Annie Ford (Fiddle, Vocals) and a rotating cast of washboard, washtub, trumpet, standup bass, and kazoo players. In whatever formation the lively foot stomping music makes you want to dance from your eyelids to your toes.
Jessika Kenney is a vocalist and composer known for her haunting timbre, wide range of collaborations, and her devotion to the living practice of traditional vocal arts. She is deeply invested in the relationship of the singing voice to the sung and spoken text, as well as the pure sounds of a language. Her compositions have been performed by gamelan orchestras, pianists, vocalists, and string players on the east and west coasts. Jessika and Eyvind Kang will be performing in Zack Bent’s installation at the Mid-Point Mash-Up.
Violist/composer Eyvind Kang has released many acclaimed albums of original music, including the choral piece Athlantis (2007, Ipecac), The Yelm Sessions (2007, Tzadik), and Virginal Co-ordinates (2004, Ipecac). His music has been performed by Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Coro da Camera di Modena, Seattle Chamber Players, Ostad Hossein Omoumi and the UCI Orchestra, and many others. Eyvind also performs as a duo with his wife, vocalist/composer Jessika Kenney. He has worked extensively with Bill Frisell and Laurie Anderson, as well as written arrangements for Sunn O))), Blonde Redhead, and many other bands. He has also written scores for theater and film, and worked extensively as an arranger in jazz and rock. Eyving and Jessika Kenny with be performing in Zack Bent’s installation at the Mid-Point Mash-Up.
Rumi Koshino is a multimedia artist from Japan now residing in Seattle. Her work is derived from the layers of her cultures, history, thoughts, emotions, and everyday life experiences. Koshino earned her BFA and MFA at the University of Washington. She has exhibited at a number of galleries in the Northwest and in Tokyo. Koshino will lead a community ceramic chime-making workshop in Duvall that will culminate in a sonorous installation at the Mid-Point Mash-Up.
Amanda Manitach is a writer and artist whose work is about the intersection of bodies, language and ritual. Having grown up around ecstatic worship and demonstrative religious practice, she considers the body a site of games, wordplay, dissolution and excess. Much of her work finds its origin and inspiration in absurd and symbolist literature, actionist performances, mythology and religion. Manitach is contributing to The Long Walk’s survival guide.
Jordan Monez was born in Seattle but grew up exploring the tides of the bay area of California, climbing 60-foot Ficus trees in Florida, swimming and skating on lakes of New England, walking the foothills and flatlands of Virginia, and commuting by bicycle in Copenhagen. She has degrees in architecture and landscape architecture, and has worked in the fields of rural land conservation and urban design. Jordan’s work as an artist explores ideas and phenomena in landscape, architecture, geography, and urbanism using various mediums and scales. As such, she is working with Susan Robb to develop The Long Walk’s survival guide.
Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory of this birth, but he does remember noticing himself in the mirror for this first time—it happened on May 3, 1972. Mudede is also a filmmaker: His first two of his films, Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and Zoo was screened at Cannes. His third film, You Cant Win, stars Michael Pitt and will be completed in 2013. Mudede his written for the New York Times, Cinema Scope, Ars Electronica, and C Theory, and is on the editorial board for Arcade Journal and The Black Scholar. He is contributing to The Long Walk’s survival guide. Photo by Chase Jarvis.
Michelle Peñaloza earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. Her poetry has appeared in Nashville Review, Great River Review and Bellingham Review, among others. She was awarded the Miriam McFall Starlin Award, the Duckabush Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Women Writers Fellowship by Oregon Literary Arts. She has attended the Breadloaf Writers Conference and received scholarships from Vermont Studio Center and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Peñaloza will guide The Long Walk participants in the development of itinerant poems, meditations on their journey.
Terry Podgorski has self-produced theater for 20 years. While at the Univiversity of Michigan he organized multi-media art extravaganzas, commandeering empty retail spaces to create venues for music, storytelling, move screenings, installation art, and readings. In Seattle he worked with Circus Contraption as tour manager, lighting designer, set designer, theatrical director, and eventually production manager. He designed and built the set for The Grand American Traveling Dime Museum that toured Seattle, San Fancisco and New York to rave reviews. Since 2009 Podgorski, along with Erin Brindley, has written, produced, and designed 5 Café Nordo series which blend experiential dining and theater. Three of these performances won the Seattle Times Footlight Award. Terry and Erin will be embarking on a new Café Nordo production in Fall of 2012 at Theater Off Jackson in Seattle. Cafe Nordo will be providing an immersive dining experience for The Long Walk.
David Sanford is the Chef-Owner of Belle Clementine, located in the heart of Ballard, WA. Grounded in the belief that a shared meal is one of the best ways to bring people together, Belle Clementine serves family-style meals with a single menu crafted for each evening, inspired by the ingredients available from local farmers and purveyors. Prior to establishing Belle Clemetine, David served as the opening Program Director for The Corson Building. He has worked as a personal chef and caterer, both in the San Francisco Bay Area and his native Seattle, and he has consulted for culinary clients including Outstanding in the Field – known for its acclaimed farm dinner experiences. David will be preparing a family style meal for The Long Walkers.
Eric Steen’s work centers on explorations of alternative education, slow living, and the social underpinnings of place through socially engaged projects that bring diverse groups of people together. He is the director of a Colorado Springs beer blog called Focus on the Beer and is an instructor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His work has been included in exhibitions at Performa (New York), Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (Glasgow, UK), Gallery of Contemporary Art (Colorado Springs), Portland Art Museum (Portland), Urban Culture Project (Kansas City), and Klondike Institute of Contemporary Art (Dawson, YT). For The Long Walk, he will work with the Snoqualmie Brewery to craft a short run beer infused with edible and medicinal plants that grow along the Snoqualmie Valley Trail.
Rodrigo Valenzuela is a Chilean-born, Seattle-based artist. He holds a BFA in Photography from University of Chile, a BA in Aesthetics from The Evergreen State College, and an MFA from University of Washington. Rodrigo teaches in the photography and comparative history of ideas (CHID) departments at University of Washington. His two-channel video installation, Walking by Night will be installed in McCormick Park’s historic train depot for the Mid-Point Mash-Up.
Born in Hong Kong, Joyce C. Wong immigrated to the States in 1990. She currently resides in Kirksville, Missouri. Wong considers herself a global citizen and conceptualizes her art in a world without borders. She aims to create work that incorporates pseudoscience and fictional realities while engaging degrees of social context. Her art borders on absurdity and relies heavily on the nature of loving, the building of trust, and the intricacies of interpersonal relationships. At the Mid-Point Mash-Up and along The Long Walk route, Wong will reach out to the community through her palm-reading project, An Excuse to Hold Your Hand.