Artist Davana Robedee

Davana Rodedee is an artist, curator, and educator. She creates large scale indigo drawings and fiber art installations. For the past 10 years she has worked to cultivate community arts practices through her role as a curator and arts administrator. She is passionate about promoting the communities that surround fiber based art making.

Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including: As Above, So Below at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, NH, In a Moment- Between Dreams, Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY, The Instability of Nothing, at Riverviews Art Space in Lynchburg, VA, The Resonance of Light at the Earlville Opera House in, Earlville, NY, and Climates, at View Art Center in Old Forge, NY. She has participated in residencies at Kimmel Harding Nelson, the Penland Winter Residency, and the fiber artist residency through Catskills Artspace at Gael Roots Community Farm.

She received an M.F.A from Syracuse University and a B.A. from Southeastern Louisiana University. She lives in Syracuse, NY with her black cats and little garden patch of homegrown indigo.

"My experience with phenomena such as visual aura, lucid dreams, and hallucinations is the driving force behind my creative practice. Because I am personally aware of the ways in which the brain performs “trickery”, I am always questioning the nature of human consciousness. Many of my pieces function as direct metaphors representing the line between thoughts and matter, dream and wake, and consciousness and unconsciousness. I am interested in age old questions like, “How do things become alive?” and particularly, “Where do we go when we die?” My practice is inter-disciplinary and rooted in process. I use stitch resist shibori and indigo dye as a method of drawing. Each work is planned and executed over many months as I grow and extract the pigments from indigo plants that I cultivate. Making marks with shibori allows for an indirect approach to image making. Rather than an active hand- the process allows me to make suggestions for where the mark should be. I set limitations. Define boundaries. Create barriers. But I also provide opportunities for the indigo to take up residence. I guide, coax, and invite my mark. The image slowly emerges- passing through the doorways I open."

Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.

I currently live in Syracuse, New York, but I always tell people it's important that they know I'm Southern. I grew up in a very small rural "community" outside of Franklinton, Louisiana called Thomas. There's no population info available because it's an unincorporated community, meaning it's basically a farming region with a few large family groups.

I learned to code switch sometime in college when I realized that I wasn't getting taken seriously because of my accent, but I'm not ashamed of my Southern accent. While I have plenty of critical lenses to apply to my hometown, that young girl who grew up off the backside of her grandparents dairy farm is not some past I've left behind, but a foundation that I stand on. For better or for worse- I'm still making artwork, negotiating, and learning from her experience.

I began making art at an early age and took community oil painting classes when I was 11. I couldn't imagine a future version of myself that didn't make art- so I pursued it into college at Southeastern Louisiana University, then needing a different perspective I attended Syracuse University for my MFA. I went on to work at the Schweinfurth Art Center for a little over 8 years where I curated exhibitions and managed the fiber art programs including Quilting by the Lake, an annual art quilting conference. This time was so pivotal for me because I was immersed in a arts community that was really tight-knit and supportive. I was able to keep making my work and the community gave me context, new frameworks, new vocabularies, new techniques and so much more that I don't think I can quantify the impact.

Since then I have moved on to be the Director of the Tyler Art Gallery at the State University of New York at Oswego. I consider curating and educating a huge part of my practice. I learned first hand from my experience at the Art Center that working in community makes my work stronger.

What kind of work are you currently making?

I make large scale indigo shibori drawings on fabric. My processes are extremely laborious because I believe that labor endows meaning. The more labor - the more meaning. So while I'm growing the indigo plant, extracting the blue dye, creating the vat, and intricately hand stitching fabric using a stitch resist shibori process that takes months- even years- I am encoding these objects in many many layers. Each layer functions as a different way to ponder the sublime. Imagery in my artworks are inspired by my dreams. In my dreams I see a lot of shapes that flicker and float. Each piece is displayed a few inches off the wall so that the fabric floats and shimmers in the air. They are kinetic and full of life. Sometimes I am trying to capture these dream images directly and sometimes I am simply inspired by them as I draw new shapes.

Right now I'm working on an immersive installation titled, "The Lovers" which is based on a dream I had. At it's core, the story is an Adam and Eve allegory, though while dreaming it I didn't think of it that way. Instead of being kicked out of paradise, the two lovers find eternity to be oppressive. They begin to envy the ebb & flow of the living, changing universe. So they build bodies out of clay and dissolve themselves in ocean ending their eternal lives and joining the cycle of life. The installation will have 5-6 large scale shibori pieces that are my contemplations of the topics in this dream. One deals with pain, one deals with the unknown, etc..

They all are dyed in indigo that I grow in my front yard, and the blue is meant to reference the ocean of "life" the pair dissolve themselves into. There will also be some wall sconces made of clay that light the installation. I am also working with a composer for music. The story will play out in text projections that is timed to the music. The lights in the sconces will also respond to the sound. I am looking to surround my viewer in the story.

What is a day like in the studio for you?

At the moment it's rare that I get the luxury of a full day to work in my studio. But honestly when I have more time to spend I am often less productive. I am very lucky and privileged to have bought a home back in 2016 when the prices were low and you can see in my studio visit that my studio is scattered between my spare bedroom, garage, basement, and front yard. This allows me to go in for a half hour or even 15 minutes at a time. I don't have to dedicate an entire day. This has made my art practice integrate deeply with my daily life. It's become a part of my routine.

I stitch artwork between meals, before or after work, here and there....etc.. Every chance I get to pop in- it's easy and convenient for me to do it. I always encourage artists to consider this approach if they can. Sometimes its more affordable to have an extra bedroom in an apartment or a home than it is to rent an exterior space. But the economy and market is so tough out there! I am always interested in how people are making their space work for them.

Dyeing is a messy multi-day process and I usually take a few days off work and then the weekend to dye a lot of work all at once. Dye days are my favorite because I'm in my garage doing weird stuff all day and my neighbors come by and ask me what the hell I'm up to. I have a clothesline between my back porch and a tree where I hang work to dry. I like to call it my neighborhood exhibition.

What are you looking at right now and/or reading?

I read a lot and sometimes the stuff I am reading can be more influential to my art making that way I am visually looking at. I just finished reading The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, and whoa - what an amazing book. I selected it because I heard that it has a very creative narrative style and since reading The Fifth Season by N.K Jemisin- which also has a creative style, I was specifically looking for another fantasy book that had this element. I'm still processing it, but I'll say that the way the story was told felt very immersive for the reader. Jimenez uses the second person narrative in certain parts of the book and it casts "you" as one of the characters. There's also a part where "you" are watching this story as a play on stage (the stage being an important story element at the end) and Jimenez utilizes a chorus to voice lines from minor characters who have been killed or whose perspective needs to be shown. It's an epic fantasy story with battles and violence, but Jimenez never lets the loss of life become trivial just because it was necessary to move the plot. The victims of the villains and heroes join the chorus. It adds beautiful complexity. I cried 3 times reading this book, and that's wild it takes a lot to make me cry, but I think it speaks to how emotionally invested Jimenez forces his reader to be. I've heard that his first novel The Vanished Birds is a space opera and he has some creative methods of dealing with time. I can't wait to read it.

I read simply because I enjoy it- but it's wonderful to come across books that feed into my art practice. My work is inspired by my dreams, but until now only in imagery and not in narrative. I've kept a dream journal since I was a teenager and there are many epic stories in there that I've been making work about for years. It's only recently that I've decided to start including the narrative. The Spear Cuts Through Water has a dream component to it, but also the structure and the way things jump around and how information is suddenly understood without exposition is inspiring to me as I attempt to write my dreams out so that they become part of immersive installations.

Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)

Website: www.davanarobedee.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davana.robedee