Join us for our monthly First Friday Event, featuring local artist Jennifer Wildermuth Reyes and author Patti Sirens. These creative women will be joining forces to share their insights into this Wild Life, through art and poetry. Patti will be reading poems from her books “Antartica” and “Unrequited” throughout the evening.
This event is FREE and open to all ages!
Jennifer Wildermuth Reyes
Biography
Jennifer Wildermuth Reyes is an internationally exhibiting artist whose interest in wildlife started during her childhood in rural Wisconsin. She grew up drawing the natural world surrounding her and eventually Jennifer’s interest in art led her to pursue a BFA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From there she made her way to San Francisco where she received her MFA from the Academy of Art University in 2006. She now lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains, surrounded by redwood grooves. The return to living in nature has also triggered a return to painting wildlife after many years of study in other expressions of two-dimensional art. Her current bird, animal and insect pieces are set against colorful geometric patterns that contrast and compliment the organic form of the living being. The resulting pieces draw both on her current exposure to the natural world and her past artistic study.
Artist Statement
Throughout history animals have long been accepted as essential to mankind’s development and well-being. A relationship with wildlife has played a major role in human thinking and the development of culture. Direct encounters with animals evoke a sudden wonder and respect. Their vivid life makes us aware of the source that creates and sustains all beings. Long before us humans existed, they worked out the sequences of life in millions of variations.
The living being is organic and temporary. Yet it is also connected to the universal patterns that design our reality, arrangements that involve all of space and time. These paintings and drawings are my way of creating sacred temples to these fleeting forms of insect, bird and beast. I’m attempting to pause the flow of time, study the form and function of each animal and then create a lasting and celebrated homage. The geometric designs that are part of each piece represent the underlying foundational structure of the world that is tied to the universe at large and is permanent and all encompassing.
Patti Sirens
Patti Sirens was born in New York, where is studied poetry at the St. Marks Poetry Project, was mentored by a gang of anarchist poets, then ran away to play bass with a traveling punk-rock band. She moved to Santa Cruz California just in time for the earthquake in 1989. Since then, she has conducted writing workshops, produced poetry and spoken word performances, and has mentored aspiring writers in the Young Writers Program, and is a regular participant at Word Church, a weekly writing workshop and open mike that happens at the MAH every Monday. Her first book of poetry "Antarctica"was published by Burning Bush Publications in 2000. She loves the ocean, crows and ravens, and gets much of her inspiration for poetry while walking along the San Lorenzo River in the dark.
While she describes her poetry as deeply personal, she interweaves the natural world of birds and animals with her inner landscape, and strives to describe experiences that will resonate with the reader. Many of the poems in “Unrequited” were written as a catharsis, an exorcism, a healing.
