About the Public Project.

Gisela McDaniel is a diasporic, indigenous, Chamorro artist based in Detroit who for years has collaborated with survivors of various forms of violence through a practice that mobilizes storytelling as a method for healing. Recording interviews and conversations with people who want to share their stories, McDaniel creates soundscapes that go beyond bearing witness to violence and instead center narratives of care and perseverance. These soundscapes are remixed to allow for McDaniel’s collaborators to share as much or as little of their story as they want. Accompanying these soundscapes are intricately textured paintings of McDaniel’s collaborators that she creates through in-person sittings or photographs that people send to her. In these paintings, individuals are often portrayed through a gaze that privileges the possibilities of their future rather than just the burdens of their past. Wearing their favorite articles of clothing and incorporating objects of important significance to them, McDaniel’s collaborators are seen anew in her works. For Things With Feathers, TMR’s trio of projects for Art Rise, McDaniel conducted interviews with individuals in Los Angeles and elsewhere whose experiences with violence shed light on the injustices and inequities that the pandemic has exacerbated. McDaniel recorded their stories, and created a soundscape to accompany a major public mural of her collaborators on the façade of TMR’s building at the southernmost edge of Downtown LA. The textured, mixed-media mural and accompanying sound work highlights various experiences of healing, and remind us that there will be vibrant lives to live after this moment.

About Things with Feathers.

Over the past year the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how we exist in the world. The scale and complexity of this public health crisis have exacerbated a wide-range of inequities and injustices while ushering in multiple waves of shocking loss. More than 130 million people worldwide have been infected with this virus and almost 3 million of them to date have lost their lives to it. Recovery itself is ambiguous as hundreds of thousands cope with lingering post-infection symptoms that medical experts don’t fully understand. Between vaccines and new variants the incertitudes instigated by this virus flourish—making a return to normalcy seemingly improbable. While the virus ravages bodies, it also wrecks the lives those bodies live. Our daily routines are now very different, our personal and professional responsibilities overlap and expand, and distance tests our resolve. People continue to lose their jobs, businesses close, and too many face food and housing insecurity. We mourn experiences that are hard to envision happening in our future and often ponder what holding space with others will look like in our shared tomorrow. These unprecedented losses bring with them multiple forms of grief that manifest in feelings, emotions, and behaviors that are as painful and hard to understand as the losses we’re enduring. This reality severely impacts our mental health and well being and feels both too large to comprehend individually and too intimate to share publicly.

Things With Feathers strives to raise public awareness about the various kinds of grief we’re currently embodying and the necessity to acknowledge grief as the first step toward healing. Titled after Emily Dickinson’s famous description of hope as a thing with feathers, this project comprises three new public art commissions that shed light on loss and the grief it provokes while imagining ways to heal and persevere. Each of the commissioned artists and collectives have practices forged by long-standing relationships to communities and their respective commissions build from that in responding to our present. Through these works, Things With Feathers aims to recognize individual experiences of loss while also reminding us of their collective nature and the need to heal together.