Cedar Sigo at the Parkside Lounge, Reading on April 27, 2025 part of Ann Stephenson’s reading series, Readings at Parkside hosts West Coast poet Cedar Sigo
Siren of Atlantis, poems by Cedar Sigo, published 2025 by Wave Press
Last night at the Parkside Lounge on Houston Street in New York, West Coast poet Cedar Sigo gave a moving and beautiful reading of poems from his new book, Siren of Atlantis, published by Wave Books, Seattle. I haven’t seen Cedar since 2002, when he and Kevin Killian and I did a video shoot for my writer’s series and created the short video, Kevin and Cedar.
Cedar Sigo and Cecilia Dougherty at Cedar’s reading from his new book, Siren of Atlantis, at Parkside Lounge in NYC
Cedar looks amazing, as you can plainly see. Siren of Atlantis is a book he wrote in part as a walking back into writing, “keeping a hand in,” after having experienced a stroke in 2022. A truly remarkable achievement. Yes. Energy, motivation, love, excitement. All are a part of this book, and of course, its author.
Ann Stephenson introduces Cedar Sigo, who is going to be reading from his new book, Siren of Atlantis. Parkside Lounge, NYC.
I went to the reading alone and ran into the artist Elise Gardella, who lives nearby and who had not yet met Cedar. Eileen Myles was there and I spied Justin Vivian Bond at a table across the room. Enough gossip! Cedar Sigo is an accomplished poet, treadding carefully yet delightfully and appreciatively through the language. After the reading, Ann and Cedar talked about his life and his work.
After the reading, Ann and Cedar had a conversation about Cedar’s work, the efforts and joys of writing, and the uses and meaning of reading and writing poetry at this time of political oppression.
Cedar Sigo & Anne Stephenson at Parkside Lounge, NYC, having a discussion and Q&A after Cedar’s reading.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 7pmLight Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
German Song, Sadie Benning, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins An Epic: Falling Between the Cracks, Nancy Andrews, 1995, digital projection, 6 minsTrue Confessions of an Artist, Kirsten Stoltmann, 1994, digital projection, 5 mins The Fight, Jeanine Oleson, 1995, digital projection, 3 mins Sapphire and the Slave Girl, L. Franklin Gilliam, 1995, digital projection, 17 mins I, Bear, Hendl Helen Mirra, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins Dear Mom, Tammy Rae Carland, 1995, digital projection, 3 mins aletheia, Tran T. Kim-Trang, 1992, digital projection, 16 mins Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), Cauleen Smith, 1992, 16mm, 6 mins The Girl’s Nervy, Jennifer Reeves, 1995, 16mm, 5 mins My Failure to Assimilate, Cecilia Dougherty, 1995, digital projection, 20 mins
Video still from My Failure to Assimilate, by Cecilia Dougherty, 1995
The program: In 1995, after the rise of Third Wave feminism but before the social and political realignments of the internet, artistElisabeth Subrin organized a screening of films and videos entitled No More Sweets For You. The program firstshowed at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, then toured to Hallwalls in Buffalo and the MIX festival in NewYork City. Though each lineup differed, many of the core offerings were by American women who, like Subrinherself, were under 30. Seen today, it reveals a rich (and still, in many ways, underappreciated) vein of feministexperimental cinema at the end of the 20th century.
The works concern thwarted connections and, as Subrin put it at the time, “the fantasies, trauma andschizophrenia of solo-ness,” but the program also suggests an intensely collaborative milieu. Its artists wereassociated in numerous ways—as colleagues or lovers or friends—and traces of these relationships can be seenin the credits: Tammy Rae Carland appears as an interviewee in Cecilia Dougherty’s video, Subrin and KirstenStoltmann worked on Franklin Gilliam’s tape; and in turn Gilliam, Stoltmann, and Sadie Benning were involvedwith the production of Subrin’s own Swallow, completed that same year and featured in the original program.
Unlike boomer feminist celebrations of community and sisterhood, the screening is haunted by the specter offailure and figures of isolation. Consider the wandering latchkey kid of Benning’s German Song, the Nauman-eque artiste depicted in Kirsten Stoltmann’s Confessions, or the mop-haired child subject of Hendl Helen Mirra’s I,Bear. Nowhere are film or video employed as simple tools of communication; both celluloid and electronic imagesare likewise approached as malleable, tactile forms, made visually complex through multiple layers ofremediation: documents collaged and animated, videos re-taped off monitors, images scratched, frozen, andpainted-over. The viewer can sense lone psyches wrestling with the crises of their day, in the cellular isolation of alate-night editing suite. Identities are metabolized by, and drift between, a range of audiovisual formats andprocesses, including Super-8, manually-edited 16mm, analog video, Pixelvision, and digital effects.
With a typically Gen-X dialectical ambivalence, these artists collectively argue that isolation can simultaneouslyfoster both mental destabilization and social resistance. “In an era of corporate grunge, queer commodification,empowerment politics and right-wing cyborgs,” Subrin asks in her original program notes, “how do theunassimilated survive without being smashed, named or forced to participate?” The answer provided by No MoreSweets for You: it’s personal, it’s deep, and it’s complicated.
But my film only ran for half of it! There was an error with the projection. I created a teaching moment, however, and showed Kevin and Cedar to my Cinematography class with a description of how the piece came about. I was in San Francisco and had arranged to shoot a portrait of him, as one of my series of writers’ portraits that I had been doing, so far with Laurie Weeks, Leslie Scalapino, and Eileen Myles. When I got to Kevin and Dodie Bellamy‘s apartment, Cedar was there, having just then arrived in San Francisco from Washington State. We decided to have the portrait be a double-portrait with Kevin and Cedar together. Here’s a link to the other videos in my writers’ series > https://vimeo.com/channels/ceciliadougherty.
Show of queer work curated by filmmaker Jacob Aguilar
Jacob Ace Aguilar (@jacobaceaglr) tells me that the one-night-only screening of six queer experimental films at Spectacle screening space in Brooklyn on Thursday, Nov. 14, was a crowd-pleaser. Jacob arrived a little late and the crowd was already pushing past him through the finally-unlocked doors to grab the best seats. Seduce. Provoke. Destroy. In that order!
PARTICIPANT INC is pleased to present the AFTER DARK launch of Cecilia Dougherty, Shanidar, Safe Return, an interactive web-based work of speculative fiction on participantafterdark.art.
Timeline: 40,000 years BCE. In Shanidar, Safe Return, a band of Neanderthals and their Cro-Magnon companions, Haizea, Esti, Oihana, Eneko and Uda, make an epic journey from what is now southern France to a place called Shanidar, a large cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, situated along tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Along the way they learn that humanity is blessed by its heritage of mixing and sharing everything, including genes. Like everything – like food, shelter, and love – it’s a matter of survival. Their lion guide keeps them on the right path.
While writing Shanidar, Cecilia Dougherty did extensive research into Paleolithic Eurasia, the human species that lived there, their probable habits, foods, and methods of travel, as well as their music and art. Many of the graphics are Dougherty’s versions of specific Paleolithic artworks, some of which the artist has seen in person, but many of which were based on the drawings of André Leroi-Gourhan’s book Gesture and Speech, and other sources including photos and drawings in works by Jean Clottes, Marjia Gimbutas, and Max Rafael. Dougherty composed the music and recorded effects for the soundtrack, as well as borrowing, with credits, sound effects and music from other sources.
There are 138 passages to this story – you can follow it linearly, but the best way to read it is to wander through it, criss-crossing backwards and forwards until you’ve read the whole story.
Shanidar, Safe Return is speculative fiction. The artist has taken many liberties with the science in imagining the temperaments, relationships, joys, sorrows, fears, spirituality, and essential humanity of people living in the deep past.
Curated by Itziar Barrio
Drawing by Cecilia Dougherty for Shanidar, Safe Return, based on 40,000 year old hand stencil at the El Castillo cave complex in Puente Viesgo, Spain.
Nov 13, 1998. There was a 3-day event at Thread Waxing Space to screen my video works to date. The event was packed, sold out, standing room only for all three screenings.
Thread Waxing Space was a non-profit (not-for-profit?) gallery in lower Manhattan that operated from 1994 to 2001.
I remember seeing a great show there once about architecture, including the work of the Archigram collective. The gallery had given a lot of space to architectural models of fantasy scenarios in that show – whole communities living in the air, buildings like bubbles, transport like effortless movement in space. This was a great gallery with smart shows.
I wore my new Adidas cropped blue jacket to one of my screenings. The jacket is the only one of its kind that I have ever seen, and was made in Paris. I wore jeans, boots and a studded belt with it. I still have the jacket.
Three web-based pieces: Time Before Memory (Interactive Fiction 2019), Drift (interactive photo essay, 2020), and my newest piece, Shanidar, Safe Return (Interactive Fiction, 2023). These works are viewable on my website and are now a part of an international collection of web-based works.
The CYLAND Video Archive (since 2008) is one of the first systematized online video art platform of its kind: most of the works gathered here are accessible for view on the internet at the archive website.
The idea to make video art works and films open for the public viewing online comes from the beginning. It was a very progressive thing to demonstrate and promote video art online and to have this exchange between classic and young artists and to make an international networking platform. CYLAND Video Archive is a great information and educational resource. Each year the Cyland Video Archive produces an international competition video art program for the CYFEST media art festival.
One of the tasks of the archive is to build an open and accessible collection, to protect works of art from being locked in private collections, and to prevent their technical basis from becoming outdated. The archive is structured in two parts: videos on the website with open access (artists personal pages), and the offline collection for professionals accessible at the archive office. Currently, the collection comprises over 600 videos from different countries. The collection includes video art, experimental films, computer graphics, 3D animation, stop-motion animation, poetic video, video documentation of art and education projects on cutting-edge technologies.
The opening was on Saturday, Oct 21, and it was GOOD.
Cecilia watching her own 1986 video, SICK, at Real Artways, Hartford CT
Curated by Terri c. Smith, a Bard Curitorial Program grad and someone who has done her research. I went with my friend Pat from New Haven and I had no expectations for this show – it could be great or it could be not so great. And it was very good (i.e., great) and completely engaging. Work by people I know, people I don’t know but admire, and people I once knew: Peggy Ahwesh, Max Almy, Ericka Beckman, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Cecelia Condit, Cecilia Dougherty, Ulysses Jenkins, Nam June Paik, Ann Magnuson, Piplotti Rist, and Michael Smith. Newcomers Am Schmidt and Willie Stewart as well.
Pat and I stayed ’til closing time. She took my picture – you can get a glimpse of how each artist’s work is installed – clean and neat, plenty of room to watch, and Paik’s work was set up with a comfy padded bench for viewing.
The show is up through the year, closing on Jan. 14, with a curator walk-through and reception on Dec. 9 from 3-5 PM.
