SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
Exhibtion opening in our Art Trailer Gallery
No Lo Tenia Escrito / It Wasn’t in My Plans by Jade Mara Novarino
No Lo Tenia Escrito showcases a short film, Mi Abuela La Hormiga / My Grandma the Ant (40 minutes, 2023), and several prints and works on paper. The footage and the work are from a trip to Argentina in February of 2023. This work was made in order to remember—my grandma, us, a place, and a time. In a sense, it is a small archive, a document that marks a special moment in our relationship. Initially, for the film, I had set out to ask my grandmother many questions, and in some cases succeeded in receiving answers—but in the still and quiet moments of the footage, when the camera was just another piece of furniture and not someone to act in front of, was where I learned the most. The film is conscious of its own form, and the camera itself is acknowledged multiple times. Even so, the main subject—my grandma—doesn’t seem shy or to change before its presence. The prints and works on paper are reflections, journal entries, and photographs made within the year leading up to the show.
Jade Mara Novarino is a first generation American artist, educator, farmer, and community member born and raised in San Diego, California. Her work draws on inspiration from her family and the seasons, personal narrative, site-specificity, songs, and attempts to highlight the everyday as sacred. Her multidisciplinary work spans from socially engaged projects to imaginary restaurants to calligraphy to video to collage, photography, painting, and found sculpture. She runs an artist space and farm from her home in Milwaukie, Oregon. Her birthday is in February, her favorite month is September, and she looks forward to planting garlic every October. She is always looking for new pen-pals.
Curated by Nikki Cormaci
FREE Public screening in The Sou’wester Lodge
12/1/23 at 7 p.m to open our Winter exhibition in our Red Bus Theatre featuring
Wide Blue Yawn – An experimental documentary film by Eva Knowles
The idea for Wide Blue Yawn occurred to Eva after observing a UFO while alone on the beach in October 2020. She always had a powerful relationship to the Long Beach Peninsula, having grown up coming here for family getaways since she was a child–and so, after her mysterious encounter she decided to embark on deeper research of this place and make a film about it. Wide Blue Yawn attempts to capture layers of history at the mouth of the Columbia River and to honor the specific feelings evoked by the rugged pacific northwest geology, the spiritual presence of the first human inhabitants (the Chinookan people), and all that has unfolded since Lewis and Clark hit the scene in 1805. Wide Blue yawn spans centuries and wonders at how we ended up here, in our strange present reality.
Eva Knowles was born in 1990 and grew up in Bonney Lake, Washington. Her films are shot with a handheld digital camcorder and have an intimate and personal feeling. As an artist Eva is concerned with the mysterious, the sublime, and the mundane. She has worked as a teacher, a farmer, and also practices reiki. She has many projects in the works about fascinating topics.
Contact: email: eeva.knowles@gmail.com / instagram
Curated by Nikki Cormaci
Contemplative Rest Retreat
Contemplative Rest: Our Basic Peace Work
A weekend-long retreat with M Freeman
Fri, Feb 9 @ 7:00pm – Sun, Feb11 @ 11am
In-person only at:
The Sou’wester Lodge
3728 J Place
Seaview, Wa 98644
The Brief
Explore, savor, and rest in the numinous through this weekend-long retreat with contemplative guide, media artist, and writer, M Freeman. Inspired by decades of heart-centered contemplative practices and by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness teaching that rest is our most basic peace work, Freeman’s Contemplative Rest cultivates engagement in the mystical realm and nurtures awe as a profoundly fortifying resource.
We’ve all had unforgettable experiences of awe. Maybe it was on a hike, or holding a newborn, or watching a flock of birds. Maybe it was in moonlight, or with your cat, or in a hospital room. This spacious weekend features practice sessions in which Freeman will lead participants through exploring and honoring recollected moments, and will then guide folks into reverent, somatic, contemplative rest. Participants will be invited into reflective writing, to share reflections and insights, and to enjoy lots of solo relaxation time. All this wonder happens along the stunning Washington State coast at the Sou’wester Lodge and Vintage Travel Trailer Resort.
How much: Retreat fee is sliding scale, starting at $325 – Tickets
Lodging is additional. The Sou’wester has set aside select lodging options for retreat participants. Book lodging directly here with the Sou’wester.
Event details at marilynfreeman.com
About M Freeman
Media artist, writer, contemplative, spiritual director, and independent scholar, M Freeman works at the intersections of reckoning and resiliency, queerness and film, and contemplative, creative and social art practices. Author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory and Contemplative Practice of Media Art (The 3rd Thing, 2020/winner of the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Creativity & Innovation) and creator of Cinema Divina (short films for contemplative practice), Freeman is the founder of Contemplative Rest: Exploring, Savoring & Resting in the Numinous; and co-curator of Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-based Disturbances. Their text and media arts essays have been published in or at The Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Rolling Stone, Abbey of the Arts, and Good Symptom. Their films are screened on PBS and in galleries, spirituality centers and festivals worldwide. marilynfreeman.com.
M Freeman photo by Anne de Marcken
Each March The Sou’wester is given over to 30+ artists and art collectives for a week of residency work culminating in a public exhibition of performances, installations & studio tours. Arts Week highlights the creative process and experiential nature of the Sou’wester Artist Residency Program. Arts week 2024 hopes to create communal movement from the confluence of individual flow states. Through each of our visions, we come together to share in making something bigger. How does this energized space wash back on us? How does it inspire us, heal us, move us towards a sense of belonging? What do we take back from this exchange to seed our own revisioning?
Schedule and itinerary TBA
Each March The Sou’wester is given over to 30+ artists and art collectives for a week of residency work culminating in a public exhibition of performances, installations & studio tours. Arts Week highlights the creative process and experiential nature of the Sou’wester Artist Residency Program. Arts week 2024 hopes to create communal movement from the confluence of individual flow states. Through each of our visions, we come together to share in making something bigger. How does this energized space wash back on us? How does it inspire us, heal us, move us towards a sense of belonging? What do we take back from this exchange to seed our own revisioning?FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC MARCH 15-17
FRI, 6-10p @ ILWACO ARTWORKS
SAT, 10a-12p @ WAVE PRESCHOOL
SAT, 12-10p @ THE SOU’WESTER
SUN, 11-1p @ ILWACO ARTWORKS
Schedule and itinerary TBA
Always Moving / Magical in Motion By LAURA HEIT + MONA HUNEIDI
- OPENING FILM SCREENING 6/16/24
- FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
- FILM WILL BE SCREENING DAILY 11a & 4p or by request with the front desk
“I am interested in everything that is opaque, that which takes place in secret and behind curtains or in the shadows. My aim is not to make clear or justify, rather I aim to watch/show as if in a dream. My work focuses on the minutiae of human behavior, obsessive habits, arduous matters of the heart, betrayal, espionage and inexplicable phenomenon. These themes are the impetus and the architecture that builds the sets, the mise en scene and the characters I create.
I use wood, glass, transparencies, wire weaves, paper dolls, found objects, doll parts, shadows, tea leaves and texture to create space and the characters that inhabit it. I believe that everyday articles are curious when taken out of context and that still objects, no matter how pedestrian, are magical in motion.” — MONA HUNEIDI
Always Moving / Magical in Motion features the stop-motion, live-action puppetry, hand drawing and computer animation in the short films of artists Laura Heit and Mona Huneidi. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes abstract, sometimes in orbit, these films visualize the things we cannot see, fears, hypothetical stars, moments inside catastrophes, and the future. On view at The Sou’Wester’s Red Bus Microcinema, 3728 J Place, Seaview, WA, June – September, 2024, with screenings at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily. A special closing event attended by filmmaker Laura Heit will take place in September. More details to come.
Laura Heit is an interdisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Portland Oregon. Her work has been exhibited and screened in the US and abroad, at venues including Track 16 (Los Angeles, CA), Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), The Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR), The Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland OR), She Works Flexible (Houston, TX), REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), MoMA (NYC, NY), Millennium Film (NYC, NY), Pompidou (Paris, France), TBA Festival (Portland, OR), the Guggenheim Museum (NYC, NY), Walt Disney Hall (Los Angeles, CA), and Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit, MI) among others. Her grants include; 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship, Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, The British Council, and the MacDowell Colony. She has previously held positions at PNCA as chair of Animated Arts, SAIC, and Cal Arts where she was co-director of the Experimental Animation Department. Her book Animators Sketchbooks was published in 2013 by Thames and Hudson.
Mona Huneidi is an animator/filmmaker who was born and raised in Kuwait. She went to primary schools in Lebanon and Kuwait and arrived in the US in 1980 to pursue her education. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. She worked as an assistant producer for television productions in Kuwait in the late 80s and early 90s. Upon returning to the US, she joined the pre-production team at Imago Theatre working as a puppeteer, a dramaturg, prop master and a set dresser. She earned a Drammy award in 2004 for the projection design on the play Missing Mona. She writes, creates and produces her own animated films, which have been shown locally at Performance Works Northwest, Imago Theatre Cabaret and PCC’s Art Week. Her work has also been screened internationally at Festival Du Cinéma Bruxelles, Festival De Cine Internacional De Barcelona, Animacam Online Animation Festival Galicia, and the Cannes Short Film Festival.
Curated by Nikki Cormaci
Recent Master of Art graduate from Notre Dame and new studio manager at Ilwaco Artworks, Hans Miles will share details and stories of his 15 years in the ceramic field- from explorations in salt fired pottery, time leading an art residency program at a ceramic sewer pipe factory and his move into monumental sculpture. Hans has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, and was the recent recipient of the annual purchase award at the Midwest Museum of American Art. His exhibition “Dyer 15” will be on display at Ilwaco Artworks art gallery from September 14th – October 31st.
Recent Master of Art graduate from Notre Dame and new studio manager at Ilwaco Artworks, Hans Miles will share details and stories of his 15 years in the ceramic field- from explorations in salt fired pottery, time leading an art residency program at a ceramic sewer pipe factory and his move into monumental sculpture. Hans has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, and was the recent recipient of the annual purchase award at the Midwest Museum of American Art. His exhibition “Dyer 15” is on display at Ilwaco Artworks art gallery from September 14th – October 31st.
What If
an intimate solo exhibition of sculptural works by Dawn Stetzel
Nov-Dec 2024
Artist Talk Sat, Dec 21st | 6pm | Free and open to all!
Fire Coversall Fire Coveralls
2023
zip hazmat suit, image transfers, urban fire zone
Fire Coveralls is a hazmat suit covered in flames, wearable, by me, by many. I use this wearable fire suit as a garment that I can climb into, as a way to try to enter, to attempt to more fully engage in a conversation I am unable to understand. Temperatures rise and extended fire seasons intensify. I made Fire Coveralls as fire seems to cover all, and I don’t know what to do about it. This work gives me the opportunity to grapple with how to exist in our climate crisis and live in our house on fire.
Biography
Dawn Stetzel is a visual artist from the United States living on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Her body-activated sculptures become ambitious attempts at reimagining a sustainable existence. The heart of her deep emotional distress lays within the climate crisis and its impact on disparity and spatial and environmental justice. Using a tinge of the ridiculous, these works suggest struggles seeking opportunistic-existence within dysfunction.
She has a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has exhibited widely through multiple solo exhibitions, public art commissions and group exhibitions across the United States including Grounds for Sculpture, Disjecta and the Portland Biennial. Her work is included in permanent public collections at The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Shiwan Ceramic Museum in the Guangdong Province of China. Her work is printed in multiple publications, she has shown internationally and has lectured in the United States, China and Brazil. Innovative in her field and in recognition of the quality of her work and dedication to her art over a period of many years, she was recently awarded a 2024 Individual Support Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in New York.
web: dawnstetzel.com
Artist Statement
I make sculptural objects, contraptions that interact with a specific environment. These environments are usually in the margins of places, feeling somehow desolate, vast, or lonely due to forms of neglect or absence. These are places I find oddly fascinating, sometimes disgusting and pull at visceral threads in my being. Often these landscapes exhibit hints of resourcefulness and potential paths to new ways of living in a place, thus they feel somewhat like home to me.
Within this environment I use my sculpture as a tool, or mode of locomotion in which to navigate the landscape. Manually operated, these pieces require me to physically propel, push, pull, row or ski and push the limits of my physical strength, safety and comfort levels. This process places my work between sculpture and performance.
My sculptures embrace the aesthetics of resourcefulness, repairing, adaptability and invention. I prefer a low-tech approach and glean materials from my surroundings. I select all materials for their inherent story of place relevant to the concepts within each sculpture. This process of collecting materials puts me in the edges of places, a process I need to connect me to my emotions, the specifics of place and a non-threatening bridge of connection to other people through their discards.
I am currently making work that struggles with seeking moments of survival within a dysfunctional system, on the move, searching opportunistic existence. I use a tinge of the ridiculous and make pieces that function but just barely. I am exploring spatial and environmental justice, systematic disparity, and the climate crisis. The heart of my deep emotional distress lays within our overlapping crises as the climate crisis connects us all and at the same time amplifies our disparity gap.
Implementing a mechanism of survival is not a safe feeling; it is one of risk, uncertainty and maybe just barely making it. The solo nature of this work and many of my pieces reflect my extreme independence as a trauma response. It contains a longing for trust in the universe, in humanity and political systems to equitably help and protect when needed