Billy von Raven
Entangled Futures/Entangled Watersheds
What if this life was a musical score on a map of ecological history, one you could walk through, touch, or hear? I see art-making as world-making, a living, evolving story, song, map, or contextualized history. Critical to making maps is understanding how the way I listen informs the process. Maps are imperfect, temporary tools of navigating a world that is always in flux, and what is excluded from them is perhaps more fundamental than what is included. The attempt to understand how I know what I know about environmental experiences informs my art practice, which investigates the power differentials of space, access, belonging, and being bodied. Sound and sensory information outside of visuality are integral to this embodied process of mapmaking, which involves ways to lift narratives—including those of nonhuman agencies—that have been glossed out of dominant histories by a paradigm of extraction and erasure. Drawing and music are central to this nonlinear cartography. Unlike spoken language, these don't need to adhere to grammatical rules that separate the subject from the object, human from nature. It’s visceral history—my perception and thought going for a walk along the skin of the world.
The thesis exhibition Entangled Watersheds/Entangled Futures comprises gathered materials and video from the Willamette Basin and sounds collaboratively recorded from the Trinity River Watershed in the land known as Texas where I was born. This site-responsive installation maps the inextricable ecological, political, social, and material relationships between humans and other beings, watersheds, land, and the air. The collected materials, like living bodies, are not objects so much as thresholds through which water moves, transporting information, nutrients, toxins, and trauma along the way. These thresholds are arranged to examine extractivist capitalism and remap space through waterways and specific place-based relationships rather than through colonial roads, map technologies, and political boundaries.
billyvonraven.com /// @billyvonraven
entangled futures/entangled watersheds, 2021
From Amazon Creek, tributary of the Willamette, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, Chelamela, Siuslaw, Winefelly, and Kalapuya land: blue plastic ribbon, fiber remains of sports balls, whipped cream charger, large aluminum can, cigar wrapper, concrete pieces, small root; from Coal Creek, tributary of the Nehalem, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde and Nehalem land: empty shell casings; from the confluence of Big Creek and Reynolds Creek, between Alsea River and Yachats River, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde and Älsé (Alsea) land: small milled driftwood; from the McKenzie River, between Lost Creek and Blue River, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, Winefelly, and Kalapuya land: rounded driftwood wands, striped driftwood; from the Siuslaw River, at the mouth, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw land: rounded lozenge-shaped driftwood; from Sutton Creek, at the mouth north of the Siuslaw River, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw land: blue and green plastic twine; from the Willamette River, between the Clackamas and the Columbia River, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Cowlitz, and Clackamas land: root ball, from the Willamette River, between the Coast Fork of the Willamette and the McKenzie, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, Chelamela, Siuslaw, Winefelly, and Kalapuya land: abandoned hummingbird nest, wood with bark beetle trails, slice of cut tree trunk, tire tubes, charred firewood, desiccant package, plastic bags and pieces, beer bottle cap, broken glass pipe, broken ceramic, teasel, dried bracken fern, sticks covered with lichens, bark, dried grasses; red and blue thread purchased from Materials Exchange Community Center for Arts in Eugene, Oregon
Sound recordings by Ellie Watson—recorded in the Walnut Creek Watershed of the Colorado River in so-called Texas, Jumanos, Tonkawa, Kónitsąąíí gokíyaa (Cúelcahén Ndé – Lipan Apache), Coahuiltecan, and Sana land—and by Amanda Carrell-Munywoki—recorded in the Hickory Creek Watershed of the Trinity River in so-calledTexas, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Tawakoni, and Wichita land
Digital video from the Willamette River, between the Coast Fork of the Willamette and the McKenzie, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, Chelamela, Siuslaw, Winefelly, and Kalapuya land
a child’s map to a future world, 2021
Wood panel, blocks, sticks, wood scraps, yarn, root ball, curb paint chips, tulle fabric, twine, plastic,cardboard, paper collage, staples, aluminum foil, bird bands, fishing line, teasel, lichen, spools, tin,leaves, 40 label, thread, latex paint, broken glass, ink, glue, and acrylic
121.9 cm x 152.4 cm (48 in x 60 in)
"the ones you love are on both sides", 2020, Acrylic and ink on canvas, 152.4 cm x 182.9 cm (60 in x 72 in).
"a sentence as long as a vein", 2020, Short story in one longhand cursive sentence/line in graphite on paper, 5 cm x 1036 cm (2 in x 408 in).
"degrees of reparation", 2021, India ink and yellow pencil on Arches paper, 55.9 cm x 76.2 cm (22 in x 30 in).
"entangled colonies", 2020, Archival ink on paper, 50.8 cm x 66 cm (20 in x 26 in).
"zoomable map of the Trinity River", 2021 Woodcut and Citra Solv transfer on Stonehenge paper, Editions 3-5 of 18, 27.9 cm x 27.9 cm (11 in x 11 in).
"the art world takes a selfie", 2020 Graphite and Citra Solv transfer, 76.2 cm x 55.9 cm (30 in x 22 in).