Photo: Tristan Farzan
Eden is a multimedia artist and arts educator with a background in youth leadership development and community organizing. Her work spans video art, sculpture, assemblage, soundscape, graphic design, costuming, fiber arts, ceramics, physical computing, installation and performance. She is happiest when she can bring together disparate materials and media to create dynamic immersive, and potentially transformative, experiences.
She is a founding member of S.E.M. collective and a designer at FZN Studio. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from University of New Mexico, a BA in Film Production from Portland State University and has shown her work at the Portland Underground Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, 516 Arts, 5G Gallery and the UCM Gallery of Art & Design. She is currently an Adjunct Lecturer in Film & Digital Media at the University of New Mexico.
Artist Statement
I’m fascinated with reframing the familiar in order to reimagine the connections between individuals, communities and the systems we live in. My work sprouts at the interstices of nature, refuse, memory and the sacred. I use fragmentation and disorientation to produce chinks in quotidien reality, inviting in the Unfamiliar so we may meet our inner and outer worlds anew.
For me art is a pathway to making sense of myself, the world and my place in it. While I enjoy making things that are harmonious and aesthetically pleasing, I’m more interested in how art can help us confront and commune with the great mysteries. I look for ways to tune into the subtler currents in the world and in myself. I build worlds where our normal assumptions and linear thinking are interrupted. My works remain intentionally open to interpretation, inviting the viewer to look, as into a mirror, and project their own meanings, which then intersect with meanings implicitly present in the aesthetic and form of the piece. Thus, like tarot and astrology, my works may function as symbolic mirrors. My hope is to create a memorable encounter that reminds us of lingering questions we have already asked ourselves.
Through art making I contemplate the very long timelines that actually link my body today to the bodies of strange creatures that lived long long ago, or that live today in far flung places. Places that we touch without knowing it. All life is connected; through marks in our DNA, via microorganisms that are part of us, air and water that have been circulating through us for millennia and through things we throw away that migrate to the deepest ocean trenches. We have all passed and will pass through one another. If we touch all these things, how do they touch us?
