Maternal Mitochondria contributed this poetry video to a recent show at Wonzimer Gallery in L.A., “Mother Memory.”
Tag: miriam sagan
Foto Forum Members’ Show 2025
Join us for the opening of Foto Forum‘s sixth annual members show! Maternal Mitochondria’s piece “Hephaestus Triumphant” will be shown, along with many other works. The opening is Friday, February 7th, from 5-7pm.
Text/Message
Maternal Mitochondria has three pieces in the show “Text/Message” with Shoebox Projects in LA. The show description: “Text/Message” focuses on how we use text in fine art. Whether painting, sculpture, mixed media, video, digital, the use of text plays an integral part in telling stories. It can add a poetic layer, or a humorous anecdote. Text can challenge societal assumptions, activate our inner desires or crusade for long held beliefs. Text also lies.
Zoom Art Opening
Shoebox Projects, based in LA, will be having their opening online for the show Text/Message. Maternal Mitochondria has three pieces in the show!
Click here for the Facebook invite!
Pollux Awardee
Maternal Mitochondria’s project “Original Face: In the Water” is a part of the 19th Edition of the Pollux Awards, which will be followed by a show at FotoNostrum’s gallery in December of 2023. All of the winners in various categories can be found here. Look for us in Non-Professional: Nude and Figure!
“Original Face” is a long-term photography project documenting the female members of my family and placing them in collaged environments which speak to the sublime, the doors of life and death opening and closing, and the perspective of the hidden v the seen. When the male gaze is removed, what is left? Is this the female gaze, the gaze of the self-portrait? Who is the subject and who is the object. What does it mean to have a self, a no self, an existential void within an embodied subject.
This project was made in collaboration with my mother, the poet Miriam Sagan. We work together as “Maternal Mitochondria,” handing the camera back and forth, writing back and forth. Therefore the patriarchal hierarchy of artistic endeavor is broken, and the matrilineal line is strengthened. This is how we see ourselves and each other. This is how we see.
New Book- Border Line
Miriam Sagan has a new book out with Cholla Needles Press! The cover photograph is one of mine. If you’d like a copy, either let me know through e-mail or order one here.
Pecha Kucha Night in Santa Fe
The Spell: The Magic of Words and Imagery
The Spell is an upcoming show in the Visual Arts Gallery at Santa Fe Community College, showcasing work by Maternal Mitochondria. I’m really excited to showing at my alma mater and with so many local artists whom I admire!
Opens: Thursday, October 6th, from 4-6pm
Closes: Thursday, December 8th
Video for “What We Wrote on the Water”
While we do encourage you to visit the installation in person, that obviously is not possible for everyone, so we are making the video available for separate viewing. Please enjoy Maternal Mitochondria’s experimental video “What We Wrote on the Water”!
The installation is available by appointment in Santa Fe, NM until February 8th 2021. E-mail msagan1035@aol.com or call 505-231-1922 to schedule a viewing.
What We Wrote on the Water
Maternal Mitochondria has a new art show up with Vital Spaces arts organization! Located in the Midtown Annex, 1600 St. Michaels Drive, and available by appointment only (in order to ensure COVID-safe practices), What We Wrote on The Water is a video installation constructed from the poetry of borders, drumming in a dream, the scarce commodity of water in the desert, and gestures in ink. The installation will be available to experience from January 9th-February 8th, and there is no fee!
In a dark enclosed womb of space, the video projects over a large vase, filled with water. It features the Japanese art of suminagashi, spoken poetry, and percussive drums. The projection overlaps the glass, creating new shadows and reflections. This is an immersive experience, playing with materials such as ink and glass, and the metaphor of water as the unconscious mind.
What We Wrote on the Water explores the dialectical flow between creator and viewer, form and meaning, being both on the surface of the water and under it. The viewer leaves refreshed, having temporarily been elsewhere.
FOR APPOINTMENTS: From January 9th-February 8th, please call Isabel at 505-231-1922 or e-mail Miriam at msagan1035@aol.com.
Maternal Mitochondria is a mother-daughter creative duo collaborating in Santa Fe. Miriam Sagan is a writer and Isabel Winson-Sagan is an interdisciplinary artist. Their bilingual video installation of suminagashi and poetry, Thresh/hold, premiered in an abandoned square grain silo at Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan in 2018. They produced a poetry and suminagashi installation in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park with more than twenty participants, aged 4 to 80. The walking path at Santa Fe Skies RV Park on Route 14 is host to their Fairy Houses installation in recycled metal, which has had numerous visitors during the pandemic. For What We Wrote on the Water, they have also collaborated with local drummer Tim Brown.
Art by Isabel W.S. 