Residency time: 15 April - 13 May
Show time: 22 - 31 May during Vruchtbare Grond
We asked Megan some questions:
Where are you from and how does that affect your work? I’m from the U.S., where I grew up in a small town in Michigan. I was raised in the countryside in a house my father built near my grandfather’s heifer farm, where several of my family members work. I have not lived in Michigan since I left home for university seven years ago, but my hometown and the land I knew so well, the highways and Great Lakes and forests, remain potent in my work.
Questioning the meaning of ‘home’ is a persistent theme in my poetry as I wrestle with the consequences of perpetually moving and the absence of imminent return. I want to ask how ‘belonging’ to a place is negotiated, and how we find love and community in the midst of criss-crossing flight paths. If the poetry transitions into a work of video art, the imagery I use, whether filmed by myself or pulled from archives, can echo or contradict this sense of place.
Why do you want to make art? It feels essential to try and capture the joy and depth and pain that any one life can offer; in the process of artmaking there emerges a profound sense of beauty in all the mess, which seems to me to be a kind of heart-knowledge. I make art to know and be known. And haven’t we all discovered art which captured perfectly a feeling we thought we were alone in—perhaps a feeling we thought was inarticulable? I want to be a witness to my own life, and I hope I discover I am not unique in the slightest, but rather that I find unexpected intimacy with strangers.
Do your other interests influence your art? I’m deeply influenced by music, films, poetry, and the life stories of other artists. I’m into analog music and I collect records and cassette tapes, both for the songs and for the sense of history each item carries with it. I’m interested in the traces people leave behind in the objects they love, and I also love to learn about the lives led by artists that influenced their work. For example, previous poems of mine have referenced figures like Jeff Buckley, R.E.M., and SOPHIE.
Sonically, I’m especially influenced by post-rock, ambient and noise music. I often listen to a specific song intently while working on a poem and this affects the mood and rhythm, especially when I sense that a poem should have a separate life in the form of a video, in which case I am already thinking about sonic pairings for the post-production phase. I’m also a bit of a compulsive field-recorder, probably stemming from my days doing radio, and I now have a vast personal archive of ambient sound and conversation which I plan to draw from in my installation.
How has your education helped you in your career? I studied Ethnic Studies at Yale in my undergrad; this period of time was formative as I found my way through the radio and filmmaking scene on campus, and was able to collaborate with so many talented peers. University was also where I developed my poetic voice in formal courses, and where I began to bring my different interests together, primarily filmmaking and film photography, writing, and print design. I was lucky enough to take a film course with the video artist Michel Auder which dramatically reshaped my visual and experimental sensibility.
My degree in Ethnic Studies examined systems of oppression and the theories and histories of resistance from a critical race perspective; this course of study radically shaped my politics, my commitment to community, and thus my sense of self in relation to the world. This naturally influences my art in innumerable ways. An example of a more direct influence is my study of the surrealism movement in the early 20th-century, and in particular anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire; the expansive and liberatory possibilities they articulated about surrealism urgently shaped my writing and visual style in subsequent projects. To this day, I return often to Suzanne Césaire’s surrealist poem “Domain of the Marvelous” for inspiration.
