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ARTIFICE

Hovering Between Nature and Culture

The artists in FAWC’s group exhibition have an elusive grasp on the natural world

By Abraham Storer Jun 25, 2025

Nature isn’t always natural, suggests the Fine Arts Work Center’s summer exhibition, “To Move a Mountain.”

Coady Brown, an artist who curated the work by nine former FAWC fellows, writes in the exhibition statement about flowers as romantic symbols. She includes one of her own flower paintings in the show — a simple bouquet against a background the color of a faded yellow highlighter. The synthetic color and Brown’s stylized brush stokes divorce these flowers from nature. Jagged forest-green shapes describe leaves, but they are not a realistic description of foliage. These leaves and flowers belong more to the language of abstraction and painting — the domain of culture.

*Bouquet #15* by Coady Brown. (Photos courtesy Fine Arts Work Center)

Of course, many aspects of nature — including flowers, vegetables, parks, and animals — have long been controlled, domesticated, and poeticized by humans. This exhibition highlights that mediation and suggests that when we look at an artwork depicting something from the natural world, we’re not really seeing nature in any pure sense but rather a reflection of our culture.

The exhibition, spread across two rooms in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery, is sparse. Colorful paintings dominate, but there is also sculpture, photography, and drawing. The first room is anchored by two large-scale works, a painting by Dani Levine and a charcoal-and-pastel drawing by Alina Perez. Both works are landscapes, in a sense, but their colors are decidedly synthetic. The landscapes in these paintings are not records of specific places but rather springboards to explore sexuality, kitsch, and abstraction.

Perez’s painting depicts a sleeping mermaid with her head resting in the lap of a nude woman. The setting sun, aqua blue water, and roses in the foreground knowingly evoke a kitschy, sentimental visual language — the sort of thing you might see airbrushed onto a beach towel. Perez’s soft touch and her use of pastels further this association. The idealized curvy figures of the two women belong to a similar world — they’re more pinup girls than observed bodies. The elements of this picture are codes of human aspirations for escape and fantasy.

*I Am the Orchid, and You Are the Sun* by Alina Perez.

Levine’s painting is nearly abstract, but there’s reference to the landscape in a patch of blue sky and a shape that arises like a sail. For Levine, the landscape is an armature to explore material concerns — each element of this painting is created with carefully chosen pigments, mediums, and grounds to evoke different qualities of airiness and density.

Like Perez and many other artists in the exhibition, Levine also uses the landscape as a setting for asserting identity. The orange shape rising upward is an abstracted labrys, a double ax adopted as symbol of lesbianism. It’s her sail — or flag — planted in the landscape.

Cheyenne Julien and Lamar Peterson also insert depictions of their communities in bucolic settings, subverting the notion of the pastoral as a white space. Peterson’s painting belongs to a recent series by the artist depicting black men in gardens. In Untitled, a man sits cross-legged on a blanket in the grass surrounded by flowers, mushrooms, butterflies, and images of animal’s heads. Purple mountains lie on the horizon; fluffy clouds and a cheerful sun hang in the cerulean sky. The high-key color, flattened space, and outlined objects suggest coloring books and children’s drawings. In this painting, the garden is a product of the imagination — a cultivated space of innocence and escape — and a cultural domain where Peterson’s African American men can rest, free from any cultural expectation of them as urban and beleaguered.

Julien is an artist living and working in the Bronx. In her figurative paintings and drawings, she uses humor, exaggerated features, and dramatic color to comment on urban life. In her painting in this exhibition, she depicts a curvy woman in a thong bikini from a low angle — basically, a booty shot. She’s painted in black and white, but the background is an explosion of colorful flowers and psychedelic swirls. Like Peterson, Julien is bringing someone from her community into the garden, but the statement here is more uneasy, the connection more tentative and humorous.

In Sno Cones for Us … Sno Cones for You …, Pat Phillips melds a variety of painting and drawing languages in a collage-like composition. Echoing Peterson’s work from across the room, this painting has a pair of flat, cartoonish characters but also realistic renderings of chairs and oversized hands drawn with charcoal. The spirit of collage runs through this exhibition, although none of the works is an actual collage. Widline Cadet’s image of two hands holding a bouquet of flowers uses flash photography and a patterned backdrop to create a stilted, artificial connection between the elements in the image, in much the same way that Brown paints each flower in her bouquet with a distinct gesture, thereby eschewing any sense of a unified whole.

*Sno Cones for Us … Sno Cones for You …* by Pat Phillips.

In Phillips’s painting, artifice reaches a climax. We’re in the suburbs here, nature has been eclipsed by the synthetic, and it’s not pretty: the painting, which appears to be made on a stained dropcloth, is littered with images of plastic and metal chairs, empty pizza boxes, a shopping cart, and the ultimate consumerist perversion of anything natural and nourishing: sno cones.

If Phillips’s work is at one end of a spectrum ranging from the natural to the artificial, Raul De Lara and Anina Major are at the other end. Their pieces, more than any other in the show, feel earthy and relatively free from intrusions of human culture. De Lara used walnut and oak to create a sculpture of an oversize leaf. The circular grain of the wood mirrors the leaf’s organic shape, and there’s a clear parallel between the subject and material — both are sourced from trees. But look closely, and you’ll notice the leaf is affixed to the wall with a wooden bolt. Industry can never quite escape the frame.

Major’s ceramic sculpture Solitude hangs about two feet from the ground, suspended by rope and a chain from the ceiling. The spiky ball looks like a giant sea urchin. It’s covered with glazes in earth colors — white, black, grayish blue, and yellow ochre — that drip down the way water might fall from an object arising from the sea. That feeling of it lifting from the sea is also suggested by the rope, which transitions from blue to white as it stretches upward, holding the sculpture like it was caught in a net.

The suspension of Major’s sculpture — both physically and metaphorically — encapsulates the tension between nature and artifice in this exhibition. These objects come from the natural world but can never really belong to it. They’re suspended above it, maybe reflecting something of nature but only through the lens of human culture and creativity.

Unnatural Nature

The event: “To Move a Mountain,” group exhibition of former FAWC fellows
The time: Through Aug. 22
The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

VIRTUAL REALITY

Bondage and Disentanglement in Three Dimensions

Carlos Zerpa focuses on underdogs in his political animations

By Brian Zayatz Apr 16, 2025

Carlos Zerpa came to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown from Venezuela as a visual arts fellow expecting to work on an animated film that he’s been developing for some time. But he got distracted.

Carlos Zerpa in his studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

A storyboard for that film, LOA: Kill Your Masters, still fills one of Zerpa’s studio walls: color-coded note cards hang at different heights illustrating the emotional highs and lows of the plot in the feature-length animation, a coming-of-age tale set during the Haitian Revolution. Zerpa has been working on the film for almost four years, but a more Provincetown-centric project has now taken precedence.

In his studio, Zerpa opens his laptop and scrolls through images from his latest project: whale skeletons, Provincetown landmarks, and a scantily clad figure tied up in rope and suspended from a ceiling. He then pulls up an in-progress 3D seascape, showing renderings of skeletons and landmarks half buried on the ocean floor alongside lobster traps with their rope lines extending upward.

Zerpa’s interest in whales emerged after a visit to the Center for Coastal Studies early in his residency at FAWC. He was moved to tears hearing about the nonprofit’s marine animal disentanglement program.

Zerpa is developing a virtual-reality experience about whale disentanglement. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

A project about whales wasn’t an obvious choice for Zerpa. Many of his animations deal with socio-political issues in South America and the Caribbean, but his reaction to the disentanglement story led him to recognize the whales and their rescuers as underdog characters that would not be out of place among his usual subjects.

He and Elena Kovylyaeva, also a visual arts fellow at FAWC, began working on an idea for an animated documentary before landing on something new to Zerpa: a virtual-reality experience.

“I haven’t done VR before, so it’s a bit of a challenge,” Zerpa says. “It’s a very direct way of putting people in the perspective of the animal.”

The pair’s vision is of a product, titled Ropeless, that turns the experience of whale disentanglement into a game. Users will have to find and free a whale trapped in lines of fishing rope but will encounter a surreal seascape along the way that might draw them astray, blending elements of the human and animal experiences. Zerpa hopes the project can “accomplish a deeper sense of empathy and portray the interconnectedness of life.”

A still from Ropeless, a virtual-reality work-in-progress Zerpa is developing with FAWC fellow Elena Kovylyaeva. (Photo courtesy Carlos Zerpa)

Zerpa has spent his time in Provincetown reading about right whales and interviewing scientists including Amy Costa and Stormy Mayo of the Center for Coastal Studies and Michael J. Moore of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He has also spoken with practitioners of a rope bondage technique called shibari. The research has been half for information, Zerpa says, and “half getting to know the characters of the scientists, their mannerisms, their body language, and their voices.”

Kovylyaeva is a painter but had dabbled in animation and wanted to learn more about the art form. She created digital illustrations mapping out the concept, and Zerpa has been turning that concept into a 3D environment using Unreal Engine, a computer graphics game program. He’s rendering objects from around Provincetown with photogrammetry, a technique using overlapping photographs to create 3D models. For a whale skeleton, he imported a 3D model from the Whales of Iceland Museum. Some objects he is illustrating from scratch.

“In all of the projects I have done, I think the common thread is that these are disenfranchised characters that refuse to comply and try to go against the odds,” Zerpa says.

One of his animations, Más allá de la mina: Boom petrolero (Beyond the Mine: Oil Boom), shows Venezuela rapidly industrializing. Oil wells sprout from farmland while workers try to scale the Babel-esque structures. The workers fall to the now-barren ground and morph into domestic servants as tractors zoom by.

In Dos Menos (Two Less), a short animated documentary, Joane and Beatriz, two women separated by decades both die in state custody after moving to Chile: one had emigrated from Argentina to participate in President Salvador Allende’s socialist state-building project before the 1973 U.S.-backed coup, and the other had emigrated from Haiti in the 2010s and was mistakenly arrested for child abandonment.

Still from Dos Menos (Two Less) by Carlos Zerpa.

Dos Menos is currently making the film festival rounds, but Zerpa doesn’t mention this; he says that it has been screened for Chilean prison guards. The purpose, he says, is not to point fingers. “Through empathizing, or through feeling with history, how can we prevent another Joane?” he asks. “How can we prevent another Beatriz? Ninety-nine percent of the projects I am working on, there is this focus on impact. It’s what drew me in youth to do creative work.”

Politics was not always Zerpa’s concern. The son of an architect, he says his family was apolitical until the short-lived 2002 coup attempt against socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, when Zerpa was in his first year of college at Universidad Central de Venezuela. The event was something of an awakening for both him and his family: Zerpa in the direction of defending socialism and his parents toward the opposition.

In the following years, Zerpa started doing stenciled street art around Caracas, forming a cooperative of artists who, he says, worked collaboratively with neighborhood residents to beautify corners of the chaotic South American capital with politically conscious artwork. Zerpa taught himself animation from online tutorials after a member of the collective asked him to direct a few short sequences for a longer film, and it gradually became his primary medium.

A still from Karetabla, a surrealist sitcom Zerpa pitched to an American producer.

In 2019 and 2020, as Venezuela faced internal crises, new sanctions from the U.S., and a pandemic, Zerpa’s cooperative lost members to emigration and political differences. The group, which by then had started calling itself MECHA, reformed with a new focus on animation and on international clients and collaborations.

Around that time, Zerpa pitched an American producer with an animated sitcom set in a surrealist, constantly imploding version of Caracas. He thought the pitch was going well until at the end the producer told him the project was like “a chair with one leg”: an amazing product with an audience but no recognized names attached to it, no international credit, and no money.

That experience made him realize that he would need to build an international profile. A few residencies and fellowships later, Zerpa is in Provincetown.

With only a few weeks left in the U.S., Zerpa and Kovylyaeva are applying for more grants and residencies together and working with the Provincetown Community Compact to launch a fundraising campaign to support development of the VR project. In Caracas, where Zerpa prefers to be, he’ll be returning to a cooperative struggling with hyperinflation, fewer opportunities routed through the U.S., and a political landscape where the Chavista socialists and the opposition are “united by heartbreak” over the state of the country, he says.

Recently, Zerpa and Kovylyaeva spent a day on the water with Center for Coastal Studies staff. Scientists on the boat were collecting samples of zooplankton, a staple in the right whale diet, but the two artists and a photographer for CCS were there to see whales up close.

Zerpa says the experience was calming but left him feeling uneasy, as if he had seen “the beginning of the end, in terms of both the right whales and — I don’t know.”

The right whale is an inauspicious choice of metaphor for the hope that humanity might live in harmony with the natural world. But in bleak circumstances lies the potential for transformation — it is this promise that is at the heart of both socialist politics and Zerpa’s artistic practice.

IN THE MIDS

Demons on the Hour

Sara Martin is a death tourist, a mockumentarian, and a poet

By Dorothea Samaha Apr 16, 2025

Sara Martin takes a seat in the courtyard at the Fine Arts Work Center and turns her face toward the sun. It’s just past 2 p.m.

Sara Martin loves 2 p.m. because it can be a haunted or healing time of day. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

“Two p.m. is a demonic time of day,” says Martin, a second-year writing fellow at FAWC. During her first fellowship, in 2018, she wrote a novel in verse called They Wake Up Swinging — it turned out to be “a hard sell,” she says. A 50-page excerpt was published in The Seattle Review in April 2018.

This time around, she’s working on The Mid, a book that meditates on the hour of 2 p.m., which Martin calls “the hole in the day.” Through the hole is “how the demons get in,” she says with authority. The Mid is a narrative in the form of a lyric essay: Martin’s tone is conversational but elusive, her metaphors outrageous, delicate, and transcendent by turns.

A poem about the morning is an aubade. A nighttime poem is a nocturne. But there’s no name for middle-of-the-day poetry, Martin says. “Let’s call them Mids,” she writes on the first page of her book.

Two in the afternoon “is overthinking the thoughts you aren’t having,” Martin writes. “It is the interruption of someone saying life is short while another is saying life is long.”

Two p.m. is “defined by not knowing what to do,” says Martin. “It’s sort of like insomnia, but you’re not even trying to sleep. It’s watching your neighbor’s TV through their window.” It isn’t limited to its hour, either. “It’s a state of mind,” she says. “You can be inside 2 p.m. at any time of day.”

Martin loves the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who died in 1516. “I’ve developed a theory that all of his paintings occur at 2 p.m.,” she says. The works — populated by people and demons, surreal and nightmarish — are desperate, she says, “like 2 p.m.” One, called Cutting the Stone — also known as The Extraction of the Stone of Madness — shows a surgeon extracting something from a man’s skull. The patient has his eyes open. “This is the kind of thing you would do at 2 p.m. if you could do anything,” Martin writes in The Mid.

She says she wasn’t a particularly good student early on. But in third grade, she was introduced to poetry, a form that was “wild and unpredictable.” She saw the way her thoughts appeared and the way she wrote in her journal reflected in the sheer drops of poetic line breaks.

“Poetry is an inherently human thing,” Martin says. “I think that some people deeply feel it before they even know what it is.” For her, “poetry was a pathway to liking school.”

Martin went to Boston College and then the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which she graduated in 2013. She moved to New Orleans and took the first job that was offered to her, at a donut shop called Wink’s in the French Quarter. It was “the best job I’ve ever had,” says Martin. “The shop was really unpopular. I could read behind the counter for hours. I think I read everything John Updike ever wrote.”

Martin has also worked in marine debris removal, libraries, urban farming, pet insurance investigation, and reptile care. “Reptile care is something I will never do again,” she says.

Two years ago, Martin had a job giving tours of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a decommissioned 19th-century prison. “The job was such a Mid,” she writes.

Death is something Martin has been pondering. Specifically, she says, “What’s the deal with cremation?” She began interviewing people for a video project on cremation as a reflection of our inclination to “avert our eyes from death.” Much of that work will be published in August in The Drift, a literary magazine. During the first half of her FAWC fellowship, Martin also wrote a “mockumentary-style” play based on her experiences, called Hot Corpse.

“Cremation has this way of shrinking the body,” says Martin, “making it something dry, making it something that fits in a little cup.” Cremation is a “messy middle,” she says, between the preservative, conservative ideas of the past and whatever belief system will emerge next.

Scattering ashes is almost like performing a spell, says Martin — an action that expresses “a desire to believe in something.” The dust is buried or planted or flung into the sea. To become ash is a flexible arrangement, says Martin. It suits everyone.

In her research, Martin says, she’s been a “death tourist,” lingering on the sidelines of funeral directors’ conventions, visiting mortuary schools and crematoriums and perusing urn catalogs. “Funeral directors have an amazing sense of humor,” she says.

“It’s all been one big 2 p.m.” says Martin about her tourism. Every 24 hours, when 2 p.m. arrives, “you become aware of the death of day. It’s not quite there, but you’re waiting for it.”

During her seven months — an amount of time she calls “such a Mid” — in Provincetown, Martin spent two months volunteering at the Lily House in Wellfleet, a community hospice-care facility. Her shift was from 2 to 4 p.m. a couple of days a week.

“I realized that hospices are Mids,” says Martin. But the Lily House might be different. It’s not that 2 p.m. is irrevocably dark, she says. “You just need to know how to cultivate it. You have to take care of it.”

The Lily House, tucked between tupelos, is “the best version” of a Mid, says Martin. There, she believes, people face the Mid and know exactly what to do.

Martin loves 2 p.m. “for its audacity” and “because no one else will.” When the dreadful hour strikes each day, when she’s not sitting for an interview in the sun or navigating 2 p.m.’s nowhere-ness in her writing, she says her usual remedy is simple: “Yoga.”

Elena Kovylyaeva’s Creative Wandering

Looking at things that have been thrown away and waiting for something to happen

By Chet Domitz Apr 9, 2025

When Elena Kovylyaeva arrived in Provincetown in October as a Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellow, many of the shops in town were getting ready to close for the season. They were discarding unsold and unwanted merchandise in trash bins and side alleys along Commercial Street.

Elena Kovylyaeva looking through items she found in Provincetown. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

“All this cheap plastic stuff shipped here for the short summer tourist season, and then it’s thrown out,” says Kovylyaeva. “That’s what I’m interested in.”

Her studio at FAWC holds some of these throwaway items arranged in rows or piled haphazardly. They include Styrofoam heads; velvet décolletage necklace displays; boxes of plastic stands for sculpted crystals; faux-ivory Buddha heads with red tassels; small decorative mirrors; and deflated, brightly colored pool floats.

Elena Kovylyaeva’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

Kovylyaeva was born in Belovo, Russia in 1991, just as the dissolution of the Soviet Union was taking place. At five, she moved with her family to Düsseldorf when the German government opened its borders to ethnic Germans from the former U.S.S.R. After high school, she studied in Berlin and Leipzig before moving to Baltimore, where she received an M.F.A. in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I never lived anywhere for more than two or three years,” she says. “There’s not really a home that I can return to.”

Kovylyaeva’s creative path has been equally circuitous. When she moved to Berlin at 19, she studied film and comparative literature, although she says she always wanted to be a visual artist. “I was very shy. I needed time to grow up,” she says. “I don’t think you have much to offer when you’re that young.” In 2014, she enrolled in the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where she specialized in painting and graphic arts. Her schooling in Leipzig was academic and very traditional. “We did life drawing full-time for a few years, every day, all day,” she says. Eventually, Kovylyaeva left figurative artwork behind for a practice more rooted in abstraction and concerned with surface quality and found objects.

Drawings by Elena Kovylyaeva from life-drawing sessions at Provincetown Art Association and Museum. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

In the middle of her studio, arranged on the floor in a grid, are 112 postcard-size lenticular photos of Las Vegas. They depict images of buildings from the Strip that she found, oddly enough, in Provincetown.

“I want to do something with this stuff,” Kovylyaeva says, but at the moment she’s not sure what. “I just have to stare at things for a long time and wait for something to happen. I’ll look at them more and just move them around.”

This extended process of looking includes making as few decisions as possible. “The decisions,” she says, “are based on what the material itself can or cannot do. That’s why the decision isn’t coming from me deciding what I want or having an idea in advance.”

In Baltimore, Kovylyaeva made art by soaking fabric and paper with plaster. The images weren’t rendered. Her hand was largely absent. Rather, she let the material process do the work of building abstract, topographical surfaces.

Elena Kovylyaeva came to FAWC expecting to find inspiration in nature. Instead, she was drawn to the cheap plastic tourist items that shop owners left on the street during the off season. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

In Map, she built an image (or is it an object?) with layers of plaster, which simultaneously suggests earthly terrain, architecture fragments, and skin. The visual experience is important to Kovylyaeva as a painter, but she’s just as interested in the haptic, tactile quality of the material. “Perception enters through two different senses at the same time,” she says in her artist statement, “that are combined into something in between — touching with the eyes, looking through the hand.”

*Map*, ink, acrylic, oil, paper, plaster, and fabric by Elena Kovylyaeva.

Kovylyaeva’s interest in this relationship between the tactile and the visual is also evident in Bones, a work made from diamond-shaped metal scraps. The title refers to Kovylyaeva’s use of the discarded “bones” of someone else’s project (she found this material in an abandoned factory in Baltimore). The sharp edges and pinkish colors, like raw flesh, evoke castoff bones after the meat has been devoured. The tips of this piece are perceived as sharp through touch and sight.

*Bones*, plaster and oil on found metal objects by Elena Kovylyaeva.

Making art from the scraps of a metal workshop was a turning point for Kovylyaeva. “That’s when I started using found things in my art,” she says. “I’d play around with them. The pieces themselves were defining the form and shape and the direction of the work. I didn’t have to decide.”

In Provincetown, Kovylyaeva made her first major piece with a Risograph printer at FAWC. She was interested not in using the printer itself but in the discarded master pages that a print job produces. In a Risograph, plastic sheets soaked in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink are used to layer colors and make a print. Afterward, they’re thrown away. Kovylyaeva retrieved the discarded sheets from the trash, put them between blank newsprint, and then used a roller to transfer the remaining ink from the sheet to the newsprint.

Riso master pages affixed to a studio wall. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

Titled Remnants, this work examined the intersection of materiality and memory, says Kovylyaeva. Repetition was part of the process. The visual remnants of each sheet faded even more each time it was used.

In addition to working with found materials, Kovylyaeva has spent time returning to an earlier creative practice. Affixed to her studio wall are images from life-drawing sessions at PAAM. As an art student, she says, she rebelled against this sort of work, but adds, “I always enjoyed life drawing. It’s similar to walking around and finding materials. You’re really in the moment. It’s actually pretty abstract thinking to translate shapes into lines.”

A tabletop view of a pile of newsprint with ink from Riso master pages in the artist’s studio. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

Kovylyaeva’s experience of Provincetown has affected her thinking about what comes next. When she returns to Germany, she’s not likely to settle in Leipzig. “I like that Provincetown is so far away from everything,” she says. “I have always lived in cities, and I found it nice to be far away from all of that. Right now, I don’t know where I’m going to choose.”

In her artist statement, she writes, “Searching for clues to inform my next piece, the act of looking itself becomes my grounding — the creative wandering a substitute for home when home is hard to find.”

Sharp Edges, No Decisions

The event: A showcase with Mengwei Ma, Elena Kovylyaeva, Carlos Arturo Zerpa, Kevin Fitchett, and Sara Martin
The time: Friday, April 18, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

HALF-REMEMBERED

Mengwei Ma Blurs the Bounds of Reality

A filmmaker fills the gaps with feeling and memory

By Aden Choate Apr 9, 2025

On a Sunday afternoon in the cold, milky light of late March, Mengwei Ma, a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, is making a film in the Province Lands off Snail Road. Cherrie Yu, another FAWC fellow, lies in the dip behind the first dune, pretending to sleep. Wind lifts white poplin. Cold numbs bare feet. The horizon looks a little off, like something half-remembered.

In the dunes in Mengwei Ma’s new film, Cherrie Yu looks toward the unseen. (Film still courtesy Mengwei Ma)

Nearby, five people move quietly, murmuring cues, steadying the boom, and adjusting camera lenses. Around them, the sand is filled with shallow craters — the aftermath of a previous 14-take scene. The mood is hushed, careful, and a little otherworldly.

The camera, focused on Yu, starts rolling. From just off-camera, Elena Kovylyaeva calls out, “Why are you eating sand?” and then, “You don’t have to eat sand.” Yu sits up, blinks, and crawls away.

Ma scans the playback monitor as if she’s looking for a loose thread. Her short film, Cherry and Chestnut, is still taking shape. Conceived in January in rough scratchings on parchment, it’s coming to life with help from four other visual arts FAWC fellows: José De Sancristóbal is Ma’s director of photography; Carlos Arturo Zerpa is her producer; Yu plays Cherry, the protagonist; and Kovylyaeva plays a spectral presence — her face won’t appear on screen, only her feet and her voice, with her lines to be dubbed later in Mandarin. Like much of Ma’s work, the film blurs the lines between real and imagined, ritual and routine.

“Before shooting, I do scene work,” says Ma, which involves imagining and real-world scouting. To find this spot in the dunes, she wandered for hours the day before. “I try to think about why I’m writing this, what I’m getting out of it, what I need, how I should feel, and how I want to make people feel,” she says.

Cherry and Chestnut begins with a simple quest: Cherry, in search of her ex’s recipe for grits, returns to the spot in the dunes where she once buried a cookbook. What she finds instead is a spirit.

The spirit possesses Cherry and names itself Chestnut, Ma says. For one night, Cherry is someone else — the difference between the two is like the difference between “grits and sand,” Ma says, reading from the logline. “The possessed and the possession.”

Ma’s work lingers in the in-between — where identity slips, where time folds, when language starts to fray. Her films, mostly in Mandarin, include asides and subtitles in English. What is lost in translation, she thinks, might not really be lost at all. Small gaps in language, she says, “can be filled up with feeling and memory.”

The idea for Cherry and Chestnut came during a walk from Ma’s studio to the Provincetown library. “It was already pretty dark, and I was looking at this town,” she says. “It felt very unreal to me — like I was in a Miyazaki film or a Japanese fairy tale with European characters.”

The mood stuck. She started thinking about ghosts, and what it means to haunt a space you don’t belong to. “If you don’t have a body, you don’t have your past,” she says. “Or maybe you have too much past from other people, so you don’t know who you are. If you find another lonely soul, maybe you just take that body.”

She pauses. “That’s comforting,” she says, “but also very scary.”

Ma grew up in Zibo, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province. After getting her undergraduate degree at Syracuse University, she earned an M.F.A. in film at Columbia.

She knew she wanted to make a film in Provincetown but not about the people here. She didn’t feel close enough. She feels the distance, she says, “between the actual life here and my life.”

That sense of dislocation, of drifting slightly outside the frame, is a theme in her earlier films. Ma’s 2024 short, something out there, was made “in memory of the spring of 2023,” the film’s dedication states. She shot it in the Beijing apartment she shared with an ex-boyfriend and their orange cat.

Ma’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center is a place for meditation, yoga, writing, and research. It has also become a prop house, equipment room, and holding area for her filmmaking. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

In the short, Ma’s character avoids the world as it reopens post-pandemic and retreats into her private universe. In the hallway outside the apartment, she sits at a white table, drinking tea and whiskey and making excuses to people on the phone. Only when the table disappears does she realize how much it anchored her. Someone had put the table out on the street, and it was taken away. “It’s all cleaned up down there,” says her character, looking out the window. “Everything is gone.”

Ma’s 2018 film, Que Sera Sera, was inspired by a visit to the seaside city of Weihai, China, where she reunited with Yang Zhou, a childhood friend she hadn’t seen in years. The feeling between them reminded her of Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun — a painting that casts Hopper’s model, his wife, Josephine, forward and backward at once. “He did it when they were quite old, but he painted her like how she looked when she was young,” says Ma.

“There was something about the hotel room I was staying in,” she says of her time in Weihai. “I could see the reflections of the mountain. I felt the passage of memory. Even the color of the towel made me want to make something and have Yang act in it.” She returned to Weihai in her third year at Columbia and spent several months filming. Que Sera Sera became her master’s thesis.

In the film, Ma plays a character wandering through Weihai watching strangers. She meets Yang, playing a character called Meng, beside a still carousel in an almost-empty amusement park. Just before the reunion, Ma’s character thinks, “Swimming, getting married, lying on the beach, or dying all feels the same in a town like this.” But reuniting with an old friend doesn’t feel the same. It is both more and less than she imagines.

Later, the friends sit in a café and open a package Meng ordered to mark the occasion. Inside is a puzzle made from a childhood photo of the two friends. The pieces spill out between them, but they never complete it. The image in the photo is never fully recovered.

Ma isn’t drawn to tight narrative arcs. What she wants is space — for feeling and maybe for connection. “I want to make art because I feel very lonely,” Ma says. “We’re all connected. And in playing with that relationship, you don’t feel so lonely anymore.” Slowly, the viewer realizes that the distortions in her work — pauses, translations, the strange logic of dreams — aren’t a barrier. They’re the way in.

The Possessed and the Possession

The event: Showcase and reading with Mengwei Ma, Elena Kovylyaeva, Carlos Arturo Zerpa, Kevin Fitchett, and Sara Martin
The time: Friday, April 18, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

SEMI-UTOPIA

An Artist Play-Acts His Way to Something Real

Ian Page explores the edges of things

By Abraham Storer Apr 2, 2025

Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellow Ian Page arrived in Provincetown last fall from Los Angeles, where he had become interested in Wienerschnitzel, a fast-food chain that sells hot dogs from A-frame buildings. The structures embody “a type of Southern California goofy architecture,” Page says. Paradoxically, he also views the restaurants as representative of “an American longing for European authenticity.” Photographs of the restaurants are displayed on one wall of his FAWC studio.

Ian Page at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

In November, on election day, he drove around Los Angeles from sunup to sundown photographing Wienerschnitzels. He had done the same thing four years earlier. It’s not obvious why he photographs these restaurants on election days. Surely there’s a political analogy at work, but Page doesn’t spell it out for the viewer.

“I have a tendency of being cryptic,” says Page. “I’m not intentionally withholding, but I’m also not overexplaining. I don’t want my meaning to be the only one, and I don’t think that my meaning is the most important one. The audience has some responsibility for making meaning. That’s part of a relationship that has integrity.”

Page belongs to a vanguard of artists — one that has always existed — that is fundamentally concerned with advancing the language of art.

Page working in his studio at FAWC. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

Walking into his studio, one steps directly onto a sheet of linoleum printed to look like bricks (an object that’s inherently duplicitous). The word “since” is cut into the surface twice. At first, one might think it is an entrance mat. Upon further observation, it seems like a work of art. Page doesn’t mind the confusion — in fact, it seems purposeful. Page says he’s not “malicious” or “trying to mystify someone on purpose,” but there’s an element of play at work in his art practice that intentionally destabilizes the viewer and demands active engagement.

Take, for example, his recently updated website (ianpage.net). When one visits the site, it automatically downloads a text he has written onto the viewer’s computer. “I make slightly antagonistic websites to simulate the experience that you’re doing something when you’re moving around in these images,” Page says. “It’s not just pure consumption — it responds to you as well.”

The site scrolls through Page’s postings on a 24-hour cycle, so you can see only what’s available at the moment of access. Elements of the website serve as documentation of previous projects, but there are also images of things like consumer packaging and storefronts that feature the word “since,” as in “since 1884.” These pictures — along with the entrance mat to his studio — reflect Page’s fascination with the dual meanings of “since.”

Page is building sculptures with rollers that were once used to make wallpaper at a facility in Hyannis. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

“It goes from defining a prepositional distance in time to being a kind of rationale, meaning ‘because,’ ” says Page. “That word seems to represent the constitutional quality of our American minds that invokes the beginning again and again. That beginning guides us all the time.”

The website introduces these intellectual concerns and becomes an artwork in and of itself. “I think of my website as something that embodies an aspect of my work,” Page says, “but also acknowledges its limitations in translation.”

Page grew up mostly in Madison, Wisc. He started making Super 8 films in high school, and later he double-majored in cinema studies and Latin at Oberlin College. While there, he created a pirate TV station for his senior project.

“That set up a pursuit of finding the edges of things, of what’s legal, of where boundaries are,” says Page. After graduating in 2008 and moving to Pittsburgh, he continued in this vein as a participant in a sprawling art collective, the Miss Rockaway Armada. The semi-utopian group built fantastic-looking boats that traversed rivers. Page became interested in the ways that rivers serve as America’s flexible, difficult to secure boundaries. He also began to consider the “performance of utopia” (and the indistinction of those two things), which would remain a consistent theme in his artwork.

Election Day Wienerschnitzels by Ian Page.

Page says that the “tip of the pyramid,” where his political philosophy and art practice converge, is an interest in “environments that demonstrate a fictional quality but also something real.” The Miss Rockaway Armada created elaborate productions, but it also formed a real community. The group proposed certain ideas about nonhierarchical leadership, but Page noticed that it was difficult to maintain this structure.

He sees parallels in the history of utopian movements in America. “On one level, there’s this sort of outward facing legitimacy,” he says, “and then there’s an inward facing operation that often can never be explained.”

Back in his FAWC studio, it’s not always clear how Page’s theories align with the objects he makes. In one corner, he’s making perfume. Nearby, there’s a rack he might use to display some of his homemade apple and hibiscus wine. Most of the floor space is occupied by rollers from a wallpaper facility in Hyannis that closed in the 1960s — Page bought them on Craigslist when he first arrived in Provincetown.

“A really functional way for me to get into a new place is to go through its garbage,” he says. In a recent group exhibition of FAWC fellows at PAAM, Page displayed the rollers in a three-dimensional grid. He plans to expand the sculpture for his showcase exhibition.

For Page, the objects represent a “lapsed mid-20th-century aspirational quality.” The rollers are remnants of middle-class efforts at home decoration — “the dirty industrial backside of this fictional life,” he says. When he started assembling them into structures, he noticed they “started to take on a kind of punishing quality,” appearing almost like a torture device. The meaning of the work is fluid and exists between the viewer’s impressions, the form itself, and Page’s intentions, but even those intentions are negotiable.

A screenshot of Ian Page’s website, which functions as an autonomous artwork.

“I don’t say what my intentions are ahead of making a lot of work, and it takes me a couple of years to figure out why I made certain choices,” he says.

Winemaking is a new project for Page, and he’s not sure if it’s art yet. “What counts and doesn’t count as art is such an interesting part of the big negotiation with oneself,” says Page. “I don’t know why the wine isn’t art yet, but that’s because I don’t necessarily have a precedent I’m following.”

Other vanguard artists have acted as springboards for his creative inquiries. When making his website, he observed artists like Cory Arcangel and Joshua Citarella, who were using the internet as a creative medium. They provided him with something to build on.

If and when Page figures out how to frame winemaking within his art practice, he hopes it will set a precedent for others.

“Maybe it will give another artist more ideas,” he says. The process of artmaking is like building a utopia. “You have to play act the world you want to live in,” says Page, “and that at least opens up an opportunity for that world to emerge.”

Fellow Fridays

The event: A showcase and reading with Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, Ian Page, Parker Hobson, and Matthew Wamser
The time: Friday, April 4, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

GENRE

New Settings and New Beginnings

From historical fiction to a dystopian horror novel

By Katy Abel Apr 2, 2025

Matthew Wamser revels in the space he’s been given as a Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow. Working in a first-floor apartment with exposed wood timbers, he feels the presence of the past: a plaque on the door notes that the space was used by artists Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s.

Matthew Wamser. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

The studio is perfect for writing historical fiction — what Wamser had been doing since he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. In one of his short stories, he mixes humor and tragedy in a narrative about a beekeeping monk in Milan who is struck by a meteorite. Much of his fiction is set in the 17th century. “It was this extraordinary time of social change, a time when many of the foundations of the modern world were laid,” says Wamser.

Since he arrived in Provincetown, the setting of Wamser’s stories has shifted along with the genre he’s working in. Walls of Bone, Walls of Meat, the working title of his in-progress horror novel, is set in an environment of what he calls “bureaucratic violence”: a deceptively bland, fluorescent-lit office filled with cubicles. The setting becomes increasingly sinister as the novel progresses.

“The liquid dribbled from a pipe in the ceiling and splashed in a puddle on the cement,” he writes. “It was dark. The edges had grown a crust like a scab. He knew it wasn’t leaking water. He was out the door before another drop fell.”

The characters in the novel are gradually transformed by the setting. One becomes increasingly hostile. “The building has a parasitic relationship with the people who work in it, and it begins to change their personalities in ways they don’t want to be changed,” says Wamser.

His interest in horror grew from a feeling of being “stuck in a genre rut” after grad school. “The fellowship has given me the freedom to explore a new genre and new ways of thinking about stories,” he says, “to break out of this research-intensive mode and do something more imaginative.”

He’s been focused on how to build suspense, reading novelist Shirley Jackson for inspiration. He admires her use of social anxiety and isolation. “For horror to work, the character needs to feel vulnerable to the danger, whatever the supernatural thing is,” says Wamser.

The inspiration for the setting came — at least in part — from his experience working a soul-crushing corporate job in Atlanta after graduate school. “Does this job really exist to make me miserable?” he laughs, recalling hours spent subdividing and uploading spreadsheets of tweets to a glitchy software program that fed into an app used by European telecom executives and salespeople.

Wamser used a whiteboard he found in the FAWC basement to post a “mission and values statement” for the organization occupying his novel’s haunted office building: “We stimulate transformative change to nurture frictionless integration between individuals, systems and the Community.”

Given the dark themes of his fiction, it’s fitting that Wamser is a night owl. His best, most “unhinged” ideas come late at night, he says, when he knows he’s the only one still awake. Mornings are reserved for a ritual he began as a teenager: recording his dreams in a journal. He carried all the journals with him to Provincetown, continuing to use the process to understand the architecture of his mind, as he puts it.

While few of the entries become actual stories, keeping a journal supports what many writers consider their greatest challenge: sustaining a daily writing practice. He likens it to a pianist playing scales as a warmup exercise. It gets him going and creates space to keep the demands of the world at bay just long enough to suspend disbelief that the ideas in his head might work well on the page.

“It’s extremely low-stakes writing,” Wamser says. “I have no expectations about it; it doesn’t have to be good. I think if I were to put more pressure on it, to say I’m going to use this to collect seeds for short stories, that would defeat the purpose.”

Wamser, 29, grew up in Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee as an undergraduate. He initially planned to pursue a career in film, but that changed after a professor assigned him to read Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino.

“It’s a series of humorous stories about a man trying to analytically look at different things in the world, and he always fails to pin down what he’s looking at in a systematic way,” Wamser says. He was struck by “the mixture of humor and tragedy” and the way Calvino “was able to marry description with narrative, even though seemingly nothing is happening in these stories.” Writing became more compelling than film with its strict schedules and necessity for coordinating with others. “It’s important for me to work on creative impulse,” says Wamser.

Calvino’s writing — his deliberate juxtaposition of humorous and serious elements — has influenced Wamser’s work. Humor, he’s found, can make serious or scary subjects more affecting, because when they show up on the page, “the reader isn’t quite ready for them.”

Wamser was watching the seals at High Head beach in North Truro on election day last November — an experience, that like his fiction, contained feelings of both helplessness and humor. “It was as if they were all on a conveyor belt or in a parade, all heading in the same direction down the coast,” Wamser recalls with a chuckle. “It was a day we felt there was nothing we could do and yet here were all these happy seals passing us by. It gave me a solace I don’t think I could have received anywhere else in the world.”

LYRICISM

A Strange Third Thing

The best poems, says Fine Arts Work Center fellow Parker Hobson, have ‘a tender screwballism’

By Eve Samaha Mar 26, 2025

Parker Hobson, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, is interested in “what’s still present of the past,” he says. Walking in Provincetown, the poet noticed a plaque at 465 Commercial St. that marks the building as the former whale oil refinery of David Stull, the Ambergris King. “I looked the guy up,” says Hobson. “I found a picture of him on the beach, holding a knife to a whale’s throat.”

Parker Hobson writes musical poetry and poetic music. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

“Everything in Provincetown has these concentric layers,” Hobson says. “Some are more visible and some are invisible.” A similar layering exists in his hometown, Louisville, Ky., he says. “It’s a complicated place. The city doesn’t know if it’s Midwestern or Southern. It’s not one thing or another, which makes it a strange third thing.”

He writes a lot of poems about Kentucky. His work is musical, with rhythmic phrasing and carefully paced punctuation. “That’s part of what poetry is,” Hobson says. “When you put words in a line, they’re interacting with each other; there’s a rhythm to it.”

Hobson, who plays guitar and banjo, majored in music at Davidson College in North Carolina. He spent his early 20s writing songs, he says, before he realized that “poetry was something I was allowed to connect with.”

A friend gave him David Berman’s 1999 book of poetry, Actual Air, and Hobson remembers feeling his mind “blow open. These were poems that were like my experience of growing up. Berman was making jokes about Judas Priest and talking about cassette tapes.”

Hobson began writing poems as a way to come up with song lyrics. He was working in Whitesburg, Ky. at a community radio station, WMMT, part of Appalshop, a nonprofit arts collective that Hobson still works for. “I’d get up early every morning and work on poems on the back porch,” he says. Soon, Hobson left his radio job and completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

His poems are written in a stream of consciousness — but the narrator’s thoughts collide with snippets of things other people have said or done.

“All Snakes’ Day,” published in the anthology Best New Poets 2023, is about his home in the Appalachians. It was the most beautiful place Hobson has ever lived, he says. The house was porous; snakes slithered through holes in the floorboards. Hobson writes: “For the violets left slain by the lawn guy./ For the rabbits who still guard the yard while we sleep./ For my grandfather’s workshirt, clean/ in my closet like the flag of a country/ which no longer exists.”

“Miracle, in Progress,” published in 2021 in the magazine 32 Poems, was inspired by a drive Hobson often took during his M.F.A. program. At one point, a tire store popped into view in the middle of an empty field. “It seemed so strange,” Hobson says, as if the store had randomly emerged from the ground.

In the poem, people gather to watch a tire store rise miraculously out of the earth. The narrator talks with his neighbor — someone he had never spoken to before. “Now, buddy,” the neighbor says. “I’ve never said this to anybody, but my uncle was buried with a library book he never returned.” The two characters then sip beers and watch the “miracle.”

Hobson’s poems are neither reality nor fantasy but a strange third thing: “really boring magical realism,” he says. “So much of what we see and do every day is boring. Part of why we write is to understand our experiences. We’re putting them on the page and distorting them in order to better understand them and ourselves.” For him, surrealism is “making things a little bit strange in order to see what’s really there.”

Music still plays a big role in Hobson’s creative life. He released a “lyrics-first indie-country” album, Loss Program, last fall. Its 10 songs are titled like his poems, unassuming and quietly humorous. In “No Porchswings on the Moon So Plan Ahead,” acoustic guitar riffs ripple under Hobson’s wavering voice; the album’s last song, “Night of the Living Room,” thumps merrily along to a steady drum.

The songs explore an idea similar to a theme of Hobson’s poetry, he says: “Living our lives within a soup of overlapping layers of the past.”

In Provincetown, Hobson is taking a break from music to work on a poetry collection. “I’m pretty iterative,” he says. “I’ll tinker with a poem and put it down for a few months. I’ll pick it up and tinker with it again. Then I’ll look up and a few years have passed.” But there are some things you can see only with time, he says. How does he know when a poem is done? “I’m still figuring that out,” he says.

He’s been reading some poets here that inspire him: James Tate, Dara Barrois/Dixon, Russell Edson. “My favorite work to read is the kind that you can come back to over and over again,” Hobson says. The best poems, he feels, are surprising, weird, and playful, with “a tender screwballism.”

“I believe in silliness and goofiness,” he says. “Both are extremely valid ways of being serious.” What he’s after, in his work, is a sense of revelation — things that aren’t what they seem. The mundane made magical. A stream of consciousness that becomes an ocean of feeling.

“I’m really committed to the imagination,” Hobson says. Of course he cares about the nitty-gritty of his craft: the line, the rhythm, the form, the page. “But not at the expense of the imagination,” he says. “Not at the expense of a little wildness and a little surprise.”

Imaginations

The event: A showcase with Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, Ian Page, Parker Hobson, and Matthew Wamser
The time: Friday, April 4, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free

STILL FRAME

An Artist Takes a Moment

Solitude provides Zeinab Shahidi Marnani with new perspectives

By Dorothea Samaha Mar 26, 2025

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, a visual arts fellow at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, spends a lot of time in relative isolation. “Seven months is a long time,” she says. She’s been thinking about distance — especially the experience of distancing oneself from what is known.

This year, as a returning visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Zeinab Shahidi Marnani is interested in things that “stand outside of time.” (Photos by Emily Schiffer)

One of her artworks is painted directly onto the floor and wall of her studio in the shape of a piece of paper folded in half. Shahidi calls it an experiment. “When you have a long period of time,” she says, “you can open projects that were always ideas.”

In this painting, dark swooping marks stand out against the white background, looking like the bottoms of billowing clouds, or the silhouettes of seabirds, or the outlines of gentle waves. Straight, tapering lines appear among them: those are the letter “alef,” Shahidi explains: the first letter in the Farsi alphabet.

In the foreground: landscapes created with ink and soapy water, a technique called “cloud and wind” in Iran, where Shahidi grew up. Behind it is another of Shahidi’s experiments: a painting on the floor and wall.

The swooping shape is called “madd”: a symbol that, when placed over “alef,” elongates the vowel sound. On its own, “madd” translates to “high tide.”

But the point isn’t translation, says Shahidi — it isn’t even to recognize that the mark is part of a language. “I didn’t want to write a poem in Farsi for you,” she says, “and you couldn’t read it.” She just likes the shape, especially arranged in a pattern to represent water.

The dark marks are made with a liquid material between acrylic and ink, says Shahidi, that her friend Dani Levine, also a FAWC fellow, made for her. “The color is so nice,” she says. “It has a little bit of blue and a little bit of sparkle inside.”

Shahidi took classes in typography and calligraphy in Iran. There, she says, she’d never make a painting out of the separate pieces of Farsi letters. “Now that I’m here,” she says, “speaking this other language, I’m looking from the outside onto my own.” At a distance, broken down and isolated, language becomes landscape.

Shahidi was born in 1983 in Isfahan, a city in central Iran. She says she doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t making art. “I always knew that it was a thing to be an artist,” she says. “All those things that kids do but maybe don’t take seriously — for some reason I took them seriously. Even playing with play dough.”

Shahidi likes to question mediums. One question: “Why are paintings always flat?”

Before Shahidi could read or write, she told stories with colored pencils and watercolor. She made storyboards full of people interacting, enacting the drama of the everyday.

Her parents weren’t artists by profession. But her father made paintings and photographs and as a child had built a projector to play movies at home, and her mother designed and made all of her children’s clothes. Shahidi has kept those clothes — she sometimes thinks of exhibiting them. It was her parents who inspired her to pursue art, she says. “I remember my mom calling me a painter since I was little,” she says. Shahidi studied visual communications at the University of Tehran, and in 2009, she enrolled at Yale University to study sculpture. Now she lives in Tehran and New York City.

She went through a stage when she made videos. For one documentary project, she filmed artists talking about their art. In a different video project, she says, “I made people tell a story.”

Then Shahidi made collages out of her videos: characters and scenes overlapped, sewn together “as if the whole film compressed into one single frame,” she says.

There was another period when she became interested in light and vision. “I made a few camera obscuras,” she says. As a FAWC fellow last year, she cut holes in shoeboxes and invited the viewer to peer inside at a white paper circle. One’s vision warped, and the circle dissevered; the viewers’ eyes conjured new images.

The work in Shahidi’s Provincetown studio reflects her current interest in the “still frame” — things that “stand outside of time.”

If stared at long and close enough, this face will have two eyes. For a long time, Shahidi was interested in optical illusions.

On the wall are three pieces of paper folded in half so that their lower halves jut out from the wall; their upper halves are secured by push-pins. “It’s part of my own process to question everything,” says Shahidi. “Even the medium itself.” She asked herself, “Why are paintings always flat?”

The folded pieces of paper are painted with ink. One resembles the sun setting over the ocean, sinking, half-hidden, into the crease, and the water, drawn in small black marks on the horizontal part of the paper, bouncing gently in the open air. One shows a door, shut; the lower half of the paper is blank.

She’s been working on a drawing in ink made by tracing the edge of a piece of cardboard, the lines intersecting and interacting like a two-dimensional hall of mirrors. The lines are the shape that you see when you look at your own nose: the curve down to a small point, the top of the round cheek visible underneath.

“When you close one eye, you see it clearly,” says Shahidi, closing one of her eyes and crossing the other to demonstrate. “When both eyes are open, it’s a bit more difficult to focus on what you have.” It can be done by crossing your eyes and looking inward, but the image is unclear.

Darker, bolder shapes emerge from the thin lines. Those are Shahidi’s hairs, she says, drifting into her line of sight. At the beach, looking at the sea, she experiments with her vision. “I never noticed that my hairs are part of the image,” she says. The shapes are also Farsi letters: the letter “eyn,” a shape almost like a capital English “E” in cursive.

Lately, Shahidi has been exploring ink as a material and water as a subject.

The result is a drawing that feels intensely personal: the artist’s view of her own nose and hair without a mirror, an impossible distance captured and flattened. A solid black half-circle near the middle of the drawing is the sun, says Shahidi. The viewer can almost feel the heat; the sensation of blinking away light coming from far away. The moment certainly seems to stand outside of time: no story here, just an instant of quiet solitude, drawn out.

Shahidi is interested in water, she says; not only drawing it but using it as a material. “Ink has a liquid quality that is so different from using a pen,” she says. “Everything is water around me now.”

On the other side of the small studio, several large sheets of paper lie on the floor. They resemble intricate topographic maps, drawn in pale gray. But Shahidi didn’t draw them. The marbling technique is a traditional one used in Japan, she says: she deposits a drop of ink and a drop of soapy water, then repeats hundreds of times until the landscapes create themselves and fill the page.

“We have the technique in Iran,” she says. It’s called abr-o-bâd: “The cloud and the wind,” she says it means.

Shahidi tries to visit the ocean every day to look at the water. “I miss it whenever I don’t go,” she says. She goes in the morning or whenever she needs a moment. “Before I start everything,” she says, “and whenever I’m frustrated.

“I can’t call it loving something,” says Shahidi about her interest in the sea. “I’ve never thought about it like that.” She considers a moment longer: “It probably is love.”

STORIES

The Charged Fiction of Jason Ferris

A FAWC fellow writes stories of transformation that burn like coals

By Eve Samaha Mar 5, 2025

Starting a short story, Jason Ferris writes the first sentence, then rearranges the words. “I’ll stare at it and stare at it,” he says, “until finally it has enough of a charge that it explodes into the second sentence.” But maybe the second sentence should really be the first. He switches them. Writing is “a constant struggle to find the music,” he says. “But once I hear that hum, I can follow it through the entire story.”

Jason Ferris “is trying to express things not easily expressed.” (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

Ferris, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, has mainly written short stories. The energy of the form, like an opening sentence, appeals to him. “There’s an urgency in the burst of a short story,” he says. “You’re tossing something hot in the air and trying not to burn your hands.”

Ferris grew up in Leonardtown, Md., near the mouth of the Potomac, and graduated in 2021 from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, having majored in creative writing, publishing, and editing. During his last two college years, Ferris says, “I wrote one story, then another, and another. I noticed that they all had the same narrative voice.”

After a couple of years, he thought he was writing a collection. The stories were more cohesive than that, though — they were narrated by the same person and took place over the span of a single summer. Ferris decided to call the stories “chapters.” But that introduced the pressure of novel-writing, he says. In a novel, he says, “you’re luxuriating in the text — you’re swimming in it.”

Ferris remembered a book he had read in 2020: Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Its nine chapters feel like a story collection, he says, but it is considered a novel. In the introduction, it’s called a “work of fiction.”

“I loved that,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t box you in. It doesn’t circumscribe you.”

He was writing a work of fiction, he decided. His chapters would be able to stand on their own while maintaining a larger narrative arc. He worked on his project through graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At FAWC, Ferris continues to work on it. It’s now titled Strangers by Nature.

In addition to reading Greenwell, Ferris has been enjoying authors Alexander Chee, Justin Torres, and Carmen Maria Machado, but he didn’t start out as a voracious reader. When he was handed children’s books as a child, Ferris remembers feeling distinctly bored.

“I thought, ‘Nothing interesting happens to these people,’ ” he says. He started writing his own stories, elaborating on the plots he found lacking. “I was a writer before I was a reader,” he says.

In Provincetown, he’s taking a break from reading. “I had too many voices in my head,” he says. “I needed to turn the volume down and focus on just my own.” Ferris’s narrator has a particular outlook, he says, that shapes everything. Certain themes emerge: identity, relationships, sex, power.

The story follows a young gay man, an aspiring comic artist, who has returned home to southern Maryland, “a place that’s been shaped by certain types of closeted-ness, certain types of masculinity,” Ferris says. When the narrator’s grandfather, who owns a well-known golf course, dies, the family unit shatters. The narrator, who is unnamed, remains in town, navigating frayed relationships with his family, his ex-boyfriend, and various men that enter and exit his life. “It’s a very claustrophobic book,” Ferris says.

The main character is like Ferris in some ways. They’re both gay; they’re both from Maryland; they both have family members who are involved in running golf courses. In other ways, he says, they’re entirely different. Ferris wouldn’t call the book autobiographical; it simply borrows from his life.

In one chapter, titled “An Effort of Opposites,” the narrator remembers tender and tense moments with his Bulgarian ex-boyfriend, Kristian. Sex is described in explicit terms, yet these scenes don’t feel gratuitous or vulgar.

“When I first started writing stories that were toying with queerness,” Ferris says, “I was afraid to access the sexually explicit world.” In his freshman year of college, he read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, in which much of the story is told through sexual encounters. “The book opened doors and windows,” Ferris says. “The whole house blew up.” Sex now features heavily in his writing. It’s “where things take place, where change happens,” he says. “It’s where climax happens of the sexual nature and of the story nature.”

In that same chapter, the narrator remembers Kristian teaching him to say his name with a Bulgarian accent: “Kree…stee…yan — with that Slavic R that sounds a little like an L,” Ferris writes. “It closed a distance between us, no longer foreigners to each other.” Through learning the language, the narrator feels a connection to Kristian that wasn’t accessible through English.

“I’ve given the narrator an obsession of mine,” says Ferris, “which is trying to express things not easily expressed. Sometimes, it’s easier to say things in a different language than your own.” Ferris, whose partner is Bulgarian, is learning the language. Saying a certain slur word for gay, Ferris says, “I feel a sting, I feel pinched. It has a charge.” But when he says the corresponding word in Bulgarian, it doesn’t evoke the same negative feeling. Speaking a different language is a way to “hold hot coals without getting burned,” he says. He tries to convey this idea in his writing.

In another chapter, the narrator enters a strange relationship on a dating app with a man who pays for degradation. The narrator sends this man pages from his comic books, where he creates superheroes. The story considers the narrator’s and the man’s desires for transformation: “the superhero story, the queer story, the belief that something powerful lies dormant inside,” Ferris writes.

Like the narrator’s comic-book heroes, Ferris says, queer characters can transform themselves and transcend their circumstances. “Something that has made someone’s life difficult can suddenly have incredible potential,” he says. Superpowers, or queerness, can give someone family or the ability to make other people feel important, Ferris says. “It’s the thing that makes them special.”

When his FAWC fellowship ends, Ferris plans to stay in Provincetown for the summer. After years of moving around for school, “this is the first place I’ve been calling home,” he says. What home means, exactly, he’s not sure — he set his stories in his home state to examine that question. “When I don’t have an answer to things,” he says, “that’s when I’m writing.”

Fellows’ Exhibition

The event: Artists’ showcase with Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, and Jason Ferris
The time: March 7-17
The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
The cost: Free

ARTISTS

Edd Ravn’s Cabinet of Curiosities

A mud wall, privet berries, and centipede legs turn into art in a FAWC studio

By William von Herff Mar 5, 2025

About six weeks into Edd Ravn’s fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in the fall, he decided to smear his studio wall with mud.

Edd Ravn gathers material for his art on walks in the dunes. (Photos by Emily Schiffer)

“I was thinking about the idea of a white wall being this supposedly neutral zone to view an artwork,” he says. “And I was thinking, ‘What would it mean to situate this room and identify it as a place within a larger place?’ ” So, he went out to a pond in the Province Lands, scooped up a bucket of mud, and lugged it back to his studio, where he used it to turn his white wall a rich sandy brown.

To Ravn, mud is “so evocative and deep and full of possibility.” No two muds are the same — mud from the volcanic soil of Italy is very different from the sandy mud of a Provincetown pond. “If people did this all around the world, you’d have studios of all different colors,” he says.

A place-based approach to art defines Ravn’s work. He draws on a variety of influences in the paintings, sculptures, textiles, and salt-encrusted tree branches that will be showcased for 11 days starting this Friday at FAWC.

The mud wall in Ravn’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Art and nature were guiding forces in Ravn’s life from an early age. His childhood home in southern England abutted a forest that he spent countless hours exploring, building “dens,” climbing trees, and making “extremely bad snares,” he says — an experience that led him to develop a relationship with those woods.

That relationship with the natural world waned somewhat as he got older, he says. He studied art as a profession, first as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow, then in a master’s program at Yale. While he learned a lot, his art didn’t reflect what he really wanted to make. “I was making what I thought I should be making rather than taking those steps to make the ‘me’ stuff,” he says.

It was only after he graduated, when he spent four years as an artist’s assistant in New York, that he began to discover the art he wanted to make. His earlier connection to the natural world started to re-emerge.

Ravn’s studio at FAWC is filled with natural materials. There’s a bucket of privet berries and melted snow on the floor, a table covered in blue jay feathers and horseshoe crabs and golden reishi mushrooms, jars of earthen pigments, and a centipede specimen with its detached legs alongside it. It feels like walking into a Renaissance-era cabinet of curiosities.

Ravn gathers many of these finds on his walks in the dunes, which are a key part of his artistic process. “Whenever I’m outside, I’m trying to pick up on cues or lessons of things I could bring into the studio,” he says. In New York, he painted only with rainwater, while at FAWC he uses ocean water and melted snow.

When Ravn collects materials, he usually has no clear idea of how they will become art, he says. Instead, the artistic vision tends to emerge from putting things next to each other. “I’m being constantly infected with the different shapes and textures and forms and histories,” he says. Books of Klallam poetry, Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and postwar Japanese art strewn about the room also contribute to the mixture in Ravn’s brain out of which his art appears. “Often, I’ll be making something, and then it takes me a couple of months to realize where it came from,” he says.

One example is a collection of ash branches that he displays on his mud wall. They are bent back on themselves, and the ends are bound to the main stem with thin wire, forming dramatic looping patterns. The idea was inspired by Ravn’s mother, who is a basket weaver, but it was after he made the piece that he realized the wire binding technique exactly matches the way that tiny vines in the dunes wrap themselves around branches. “There’s definitely a form of mimicry going on here,” he said.

While Ravn’s inspiration is organic, his work is not low effort. He will spend months learning and refining techniques like dyeing, bioplastic manufacturing, and bacterial culturing to expand his artistic repertoire. And these techniques can have impressive results — his studio has a sheet of bamboo paper that he modified to look uncannily like the bark of a beech tree. When asked how he did it, he smiles and says, “Top secret.”

Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth.

This combination of well-studied techniques and osmosis-like inspiration is clearest in Ravn’s paintings. One is a greenish brown with splotches of purple on the edges, a large burned hole in the center, and creases throughout. The piece was painted, burned, and creased by Ravn, but he created the diffuse pattern by leaving the folded-up painting outside for days to be exposed to the elements. The result, he said, is something that he “wouldn’t be able to do with a brush.”

Ravn says he is conscious of the environmental impact of his work. When he was in New York, he was shocked by the amount of waste involved in making art. “I have a choice at every stage of my practice to try and be more responsible,” he says, which has hardened his resolve to fight the harmful effects of globalization by collecting or growing his own materials.

Ravn also searches for sources of inspiration in spirituality. His father is a practicing Buddhist, and Ravn himself studies Tibetan Buddhism. That religion’s conception of interconnectedness plays a big role in his work. He says he was raised in the Church of England, whose ideas about nature play a role as well, and his English, Irish, and Norwegian ancestry has encouraged him to explore those countries’ folk traditions.

“If someone walked into the studio and they wanted to talk about pagan rituals, or postwar Japanese art, or biodynamic farming, there are so many different routes into the work,” Ravn says. “I’m super interested in the way people view my work, because it takes me a long time to even slightly understand the painting in front of me.”

Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth. His materials come from the land around him. He will set up a painting, but it’s the sun and rain and wind that give it its visual texture. And natural processes, like vines curling around a branch, become part of the art he makes.

On a walk to the pond where he collected the mud for his studio wall, Ravn considers where his ideas come from.

“I think if there was a genesis, it happened a while ago,” he says, as he looks out across the pond. “I don’t know if I’m working with, as some people say, a demon or a muse. It feels like I’m just building upon what’s already set in motion.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 6, stated that Ravn scooped “bucketfuls” of mud from the Province Lands. Ravn says that it was just half a bucketful.

INTERPRETATION

A Poet and Translator Celebrates ‘Life Cropping Up’

FAWC fellow Lucas Martínez uses folk traditions and language as his subjects

By Tyler Jager Feb 26, 2025

Lucas Martínez arrived in Provincetown with two instruments: a charango, which is a small Andean guitar, and a classical guitar, on which he practices milonga folk songs.

Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Lucas Martínez. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

As a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Martínez draws on lyrical traditions that include both sonnets and folk songs, though his poetry sounds distinctly modern. Milonga is a folk genre that was started by immigrants and Indigenous people working in Argentina’s port cities along the Río de la Plata. “They would have these dance parties,” Martínez says, with two guitarists playing and singing in call-and-response. That style inspired the form of some of his poems, along with variations like the payada, “almost like rap battles — off-the-cuff coming up with rhymes,” he says.

“I wanted to be associated with these songs and culture that I was a part of but living far away from,” he says. “That I could say, ‘This is something I belong to’ in a poem — that was really exciting.”

But he wasn’t quite satisfied by that idea. What did it mean for a poet to belong to a folk music tradition, he asks. “What legs does it have today, politically, socially, romantically?”

Martínez also does translations, and in that realm he encountered similar questions. How can translation convey the meter and rhythm of language or preserve its cultural potency?

For Martínez, these questions aren’t just central to the art of translation or poetry — they are the art. His poems often take the imperfection of translation as their subject. “I’ve written poems that investigate the question ‘How do you write a milonga in English?’ ” he says.

In two poems titled “Accompanied Milonga,” he offers an answer, with stanzas organized in two columns that mimic the musical notation of guitar accompaniment. The first syllables of each line are sequenced to represent a milonga’s typical chord progressions — “mi, do, si, si, re,” for instance.

Martínez’s interest in poetry came, in part, from songs he first heard in Claremont, Calif., where he grew up in a bilingual family that introduced him to a polyphony of musical traditions. His mother, a professional cellist from Detroit, played classical chamber music. His father, a biologist from General Las Heras, a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, loved South American folk music of all sorts. Martínez was raised on poems, milongas, and tangos with words by Jorge Luis Borges set to Astor Piazzolla’s music and South American folk songs, like “Duerme Negrito,” a lullaby popularized by guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui.

At Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., he took a poetry class taught by Mary Szybist. He was having trouble sleeping, and he revisited Yupanqui’s lullaby. One of Martínez’s first sonnets was born in the class, with these lines: “Terrified to find out they’re all leaving you behind/ aren’t you? That they are snipping the nights/ in half and living tomorrows you haven’t dreamt of/ yet?” In the original song, Martínez says, the mother needs her child to sleep so she can work in the fields. His poem responds to a “political reality in Latin America where things like rest or sleep don’t inherently belong to you.”

With Szybist’s encouragement, Martínez enrolled in an M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Virginia. There, he began doing literary translation. Among his first projects was translating works by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, a Puerto Rican poet and artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Book.

Inspired by poets like Evie Shockley, he began writing poems that called attention to their own forms. “If you’re interested in how a poem exists as a visual object on the page, you can translate more than just language but musicality as well, by using visual elements. That became part of my writing.” He started working on collage and visual poems, with slanted stanzas and clippings from other translated works.

Grammar itself is a protagonist in one of his poems, questioning the failure of language to capture the natural world. “Grammar asks. The Mojave desert./ be more concrete explain The truth,” Martínez writes in a collage poem of translated clippings by Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and others.

Borges remained an influence, and a contrapuntal poem titled “Considering a Latinate Question” takes a distinctly Borgesian turn. It has four columns that can be read horizontally or vertically, with different meanings conveyed each way. The first two columns are quotations from letters between two translators of Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Ben Bellit, arguing about how to accurately translate his work. The second two columns are clippings about trees and Argentina from letters between Martínez and his father.

At FAWC, Martínez is completing a manuscript of mixed media, essays, and collage poetry. “I might be accused of being a formalist,” he says. But the charge would be inaccurate. He continues to work across literary styles, writing sonnets, collage, and free verse. One of the first poems he completed in Provincetown was an ode to David Byrne.

Martínez has an unromantic approach to writing. “I know people who say, ‘I only write before dusk,’ but I’m not one of them,” he says.

In a poem titled “Weed,” inspired by the writing of horticulturist Marco Wilkinson, Martínez celebrates that unpredictability. “I like the idea of a weed as a form,” he says. “This life cropping up where it’s unwanted, dealing with a relationship to a place you aren’t always in.”

SELF-PORTRAIT

Cherrie Yu Is a Perpetual Student

In her multidisciplinary practice, a FAWC fellow is inspired by daily routines

By Abraham Storer Feb 26, 2025

In 2022, when Cherrie Yu was a few years out of graduate school, she landed a year-long residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio’s visual arts program in Dumbo, Brooklyn. But upon arrival, she says, she found she didn’t want to make art.

A still from *Daily Diversions* by Cherrie Yu.

Yu, now a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, felt burnt out from the fast pace of the previous few years: in 2013, she graduated from high school in China and came to the U.S. to study at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which led directly to getting an M.F.A. in performance studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Afterward, she moved to New York City and pushed to secure an artist visa to stay in the country. At the residency in Dumbo, Yu placed her creative output on hold. Instead of immediately making art, she says, “I started to do things outside of the studio that felt enriching to my life.”

In the mornings, she went into Manhattan, leaving her large studio empty. She’d play ping-pong in Chinatown for a few hours, then take a Cunningham technique dance class in SoHo. She was also working for a bookbinder. “I just wanted to be around other people,” says Yu.

In the late afternoon or evening, she’d return to Dumbo. “When I got back into my studio,” she says, “I was carrying those things with me, whether it was memories or how the experience felt in my body.”

She arrived in Provincetown for her FAWC fellowship and began editing Daily Diversions, a short film she had recorded over the summer. The video, with no narration, is composed of scenes in which ping-pong players and modern dancers occupy the same gymnasium. They don’t interact; they’re intensely focused on their own activities.

The film explores the disconnect Yu experienced. “I always think about moving back and forth between those spaces,” she says. “What does it mean to travel from one community to another, and what kind of things are being carried between them?” The two activities she filmed are studies in contrast: one is pedestrian and accessible; the other is artsy and esoteric. But the viewer is also challenged to acknowledge their similarities: the athleticism and nimble energy inherent in both and their embodiment of discipline and improvisation.

The film also functions as a self-portrait. Yu grew up playing casual table tennis in Jiangyin, a small city on the Yangtze River near Shanghai. In New York, it was an activity that connected her to the city’s Chinese population. Yu’s development as an artist, on the other hand, happened in the U.S.

A print by Cherrie Yu referencing dance movements.

“I started to be confronted by the reality that my artistic voice was shaped in Western institutions,” she says. “I’m trying to figure out how to recognize that in how I choose my tools, what I read, and how I decide to make frameworks for my inquiries.” In the video, the connection between the different cultural worlds she inhabits feels tentative, like an open-ended question.

Yu’s creative identity also straddles multiple worlds. Majoring in English in college, she was introduced to performance art by two theater professors. In her recent work, she continues to perform but also inhabits the roles of choreographer, director, researcher, and visual artist. Over the summer, Yu directed others to create her film. Here in Provincetown, her energy is more inward-focused: instead of leading large collaborative projects, she’s experimenting with different forms of visual art like printmaking.

“I’m coming back to my artist self in this space with so many other artists,” says Yu. “It feels like a homecoming.”

Cherrie Yu in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

Yu’s studio at FAWC is loosely organized into different projects. One surface is covered with prints she has been making. In one of the images, green calligraphic marks reference dance movements. Across the room, Yu has a few small gouache paintings related to Daily Diversions. A book sits on a table: The Politics of Collecting by Eunsong Kim. The center of the studio is divided into two related stations: one with a pile of film stills printed on small pieces of paper, the other loosely strewn with materials like transparent paper and wire mesh that she’s experimenting with as surfaces for projection.

The studio is a visual representation of Yu’s curiosity. She’s a perpetual student of different art forms — new experiences are what fuel her work. Taking up ping-pong and dance after moving to New York is one example. For other pieces, Yu relies on archival film material, such as the Time and Space Concept Symposium produced by the Artist Television Network in 1978 or Trisha Brown’s dance performances from the 1980s. Typically these are pieces of history she wants to look at or listen to.

Yu looks through film stills in her studio. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

“Part of my work is to devise different ways to engage with archives,” says Yu. “There’s almost some sort of call or something unresolved in the archives that makes me want to give it another voice.” In some of her video and performance pieces, she directs reenactments of archived events or dances, often adding humorous touches that undercut the seriousness of these historicized cultural affairs.

For her upcoming exhibition at the Fine Arts Work Center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Yu is again working with archival material. Hundreds of film stills piled on her floor depict different bodily movements or actions. She’s considering ways to project them.

Yu works in multiple disciplines. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

“What is the world I want to build?” she asks. Since working in FAWC’s print shop, Yu has become fascinated by overlaps between printmaking and video projection. “I’m lifting the action outside of the frame and imprinting the image onto another surface,” she says of her in-progress video installation.

Although the final form of her upcoming project is not yet settled, Yu trusts the process. She’s been collecting these images habitually — she likens the activity to practicing dance.

“Before it’s anything,” Yu says, “it’s something you have to do every day.”

Fine Fellows

The event: Showcase with fellows Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, Jason Ferris
The time: March 7 to 17
The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
The cost: Free

UGLY TRUTHS

Young Writer Seeks Difficulty

FAWC fellow Jiaqi Kang isn’t afraid to write willfully

By Dorothea Samaha Feb 12, 2025

Jiaqi Kang doesn’t like to call their longtime habit — waking in the morning and scribbling recollections of dreams — a “practice,” because that word is “hoity-toity.” But one morning some months ago, after a devastating dream, “I immediately had to write it down,” says Kang.

Fine Arts Work Center fellow Jiaqi Kang likes to write at cafés. Kang is at work on a first novel, here at the East End Market. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

In the dream, Kang and a friend were excited and nervous, planning an act of protest in support of Palestine, when the friend suddenly vanished, leaving Kang bewildered and alone. In a previous dream, the same friend was wearing a suit, “which he would never do,” they say.

Those two dreams became the nucleus of a short story, “Sequence From a Dream,” which Kang wrote in October right after arriving in Provincetown as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. The story is a visceral first-person narrative about protest, connection, disgust, and obsession. Kang’s writing is warm, like the inside of a body, with long, urgent sentences bumping against two-word interjections and no quotation marks to separate dialogue from action. The story is horrifying the way one’s own face becomes horrifying if stared at for too long in the mirror.

Kang was born in China, grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and moved as a young adult to Oxford, England, where they received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history and are currently on leave from a Ph.D. program. Kang is the founding editor of Sine Theta Magazine, an arts publication made by and for the Chinese diaspora.

Kang began writing fiction and showing it to friends to pass the time during the Covid lockdown. They submitted some short stories to literary magazines, most of which didn’t pay. “I did it for the love of the game,” says Kang. A first published story appeared in Jellyfish Review, now defunct. In 2022, Kang won the White Review Short Story Prize for the story “Class of 1985.”

Some of the stories are so brief they are “basically poetry,” says Kang. “I thought, ‘Why would anyone want to read more than 1,000 words from me?’ ” At FAWC, they’re working on a first novel: a story about someone who goes on strike.

“I’ve never been in a situation where the thing I’m supposed to be doing every day is writing,” says Kang. A stack of novels from the Provincetown library teeters on Kang’s coffee table. “I love reading novels,” they say. “So, I want to write one.”

The first draft of a novel is “supposed to be bad,” says Kang. As an editor, Kang finds that hard to accept. “I want it to be perfect in every way.” There are no perfect books though, Kang admits.

Every day, they try either to write for two hours or to produce 1,000 words. “I’ve been trying to psychologically trick myself into writing,” they say: 1,000 words is 200 words five times, or 300 words three and half times. Slowly but surely, “It’s working.”

Lately, as a reader, says Kang, “I’ve been looking for difficulty.” They loved The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss and The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie — the first a historical novel in which anti-fascist thought and art coalesce as a force for good as Nazism rises in pre-World War II Europe, and the second a work of auto-fiction inspired by Rafeedie’s imprisonment as a Palestinian dissident in the 1990s. Rafeedie’s novel was smuggled out of jail in pill capsules and balls of dough.

Kang is also inspired by the work of Sarah Ahmed, a British-Australian feminist scholar who wrote, most recently, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Ahmed writes of the politics of emotion — of “affect aliens,” says Kang. “If everyone’s happy, and you’re supposed to be happy, and you’re not, what does that mean?” Ahmed writes, too, of willfulness. “There’s a sense that being stubborn is childish,” says Kang. “Actually, it’s political.”

At Oxford, Kang and friends participated in an encampment on campus supporting Palestine — “affect aliens” themselves in the face of what Kang calls institutional violence.

When Kang arrived in Provincetown, far from a “cradle” of friendships at home, they felt a sense of loss. They’ve never written to purge something, says Kang — except maybe in early stories where they inadvertently came out to themself by writing about lesbians. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Kang remembers thinking, “if the reason I wrote this was because I’ve secretly been a lesbian this whole time?”

“Sequence From a Dream” was different. “It’s the most vulnerable and raw story I’ve ever written,” says Kang. “Every time I write a story, I’m learning how to write all over again.” Writing this one scared them. The emotions were real and bad.

“I’m trying to figure out what I really care about,” says Kang. “Sometimes I don’t trust my conscious self.” Dreams, they say, are a sort of “ultimate revelation,” where ugly feelings emerge without permission.

Kang printed the story on a Risograph at FAWC and spread the word on social media: they’d exchange the booklet for donations to support Palestinians suffering in Gaza. So far, Kang has sent out 200 copies and raised $3,800.

“In the past year, my ideas about what writing and art mean have been interrupted by the genocide in Palestine,” says Kang. Here in Provincetown, where Kang says “outside disturbances” are few, “I’ve been trying to reconfigure what it is that motivates me to tell a story.”

In writing “Sequence From a Dream,” Kang struggled with this question: “Am I making this about myself?” The narrator grapples with the same issue. “We’re not the people who need the spotlight,” says Kang. “But this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about: no matter what you do, you can’t delete your feelings.” No matter, they say, if they’re “ugly feelings, shameful feelings, difficult feelings.”

Kang has become disillusioned with Oxford. “I used to see the institution as a brick wall and myself as this hysterical, emotional being, thrashing against it,” they say. After being involved in the student-led coalition Oxford Action for Palestine, they’ve concluded that the roles are the opposite.

They still love art history. But the pursuit of a Ph.D. is losing its allure. “My backup plan is to be a writer.”

EXHIBITIONS

Materials, Microbiomes, and Metaphors

A show of works by Fine Arts Work Center fellows is a snapshot of global contemporary art

By Abraham Storer Jan 29, 2025

When the visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Cetner show their work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the community gets an exhilarating peek at what’s afoot at the studios down the street — and in the larger art world. The international mix of young artists who are in Provincetown as fellows come armed with talent, ambition, and a deep knowledge of contemporary art culture.

This winter’s exhibition, which features seven artists, is marked by a spirit of exploration with an emphasis on process and materiality. Rather than grand, bombastic visual statements, the works are decidedly lo-fi and earthy.

Covering the rear wall of the gallery is an installation of abstract images by Elena Kovylyaeva. The artist, based in Leipzig, Germany, used newsprint — a cheap, throwaway material — made from the master pages of a Risograph digital duplicator. (A Risograph is similar to the photocopiers common in offices and schools but works more like a screen printer, using spot colors in a process akin to offset printing.) In neat grids, Kovylyaeva captures what seems like the detritus of this utilitarian technology. The images are blotchy and glitchy; abstracted and overlapping; some forms are geometric, others biomorphic; the colors range from black and white to bruised purples and blues.

A detail of *Remnants* by Elena Kovylyaeva. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

Her installation cheekily reimagines abstract painting, dethroning it from its usually lofty place. These images seem to be made by accident, without an artist’s hand, yet Kovylyaeva’s arrangement of the newsprint is precise and considered. In her piece, the accidental and the intentional coalesce, offering a vision of an artist not as a singular genius but rather as one who rearranges and reanimates the scraps of culture, reimagining our understanding of art history.

Across the gallery, Dani Levine’s large-scale paintings also contend with the history of abstract painting. Her works are labor-intensive explorations of material and form, undergirded with conceptual and political concerns (her work, more than any other in the show, gestures toward grandiosity).

In Levine’s Menace, a large swirling purple form commands the center of the composition. Like Kovylyaeva, Levine is not a purist when it comes to abstract painting. She incorporates feminist and lesbian symbols, along with popular graphic styles and floral imagery. A close viewing of the painting reveals these details, along with Levine’s athletic use of materials, many of which she makes herself. The purple form is rendered with brushy, painterly excess, while the beige background is matte. A glittering silver line travels through the composition. Levine’s materials articulate the forms within the paintings, but they also exist a priori.

Edd Ravn shares Levine’s fascination with materiality. In a series of three watercolors, the constructed image is almost beside the point. Rather, the works exist more as a record of his experiments with materials like raw pigment, New York City rainwater, and nori paste, which he uses as a binder in different ratios to create effects like the washy blue passages in one painting and an impasto nipple-like form in another.

Ravn’s family has a farm in Yorkshire — his work shows a concern for natural processes. In a scattered floor installation, Ravn displays items like pheasant feathers from back home, bones, and reeds found in Provincetown. He also incorporates rubbery disk-like forms he has created through a process that involves growing microbiomes from his body. Together, the elements suggest a vision that erases boundaries between artificial and natural, scientific and spiritual. Ravn plans to change his display throughout the run of the exhibition. Like his art, the installation will embody themes of decay, growth, change, and instability.

Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, an artist from Iran, is a second-year FAWC fellow. In her lithograph prints, she uses calligraphic marks and symmetry that recall Persian art, but it seems that the Provincetown landscape has seeped into her imagination. In Manushka, an eye hovers ominously in the sky above what appear to be waves. In another image, two dome-like forms echo each other across a space that is dominated by the water, the sky, and a horizon line.

Marnani has two cubes in the exhibition that require the viewer to crouch down and peer through small holes to view an image. In Adam and Eve, the viewer’s eye is reflected and doubled on two angled mirrors. A crude painting of water on the cube’s base is also reflected in the mirrors, creating an illusion of a swirling, watery space over which the viewer’s eye hovers. It’s a clever three-dimensional representation of her two-dimensional prints, and its funhouse amateur quality adds a touch of humor.

The photo and video artists in the exhibition also forgo slick aesthetics for something that feels more homespun. Carlos Zerpa displays his video UN/SAFE on a Toshiba TV/VCR covered with wire fencing and thorns. He directed the seven-minute film, collaborating with animators and poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. The story unfolds with surprising visual and narrative twists. It addresses race, immigration, and American mythology through images that incorporate hand-drawn elements with archival footage.

Ian Page’s photographs are the most confounding works in the exhibition. In a pair of images from a project titled Election Day Wienerschnitzel, obscured dark objects foreground banal settings. In one picture shot from a car, the main subject is a bit of blue sky framed by a palm tree and the edge of a building. In the other, houseplants and a clear plastic tarp take center stage. The images evoke the placelessness of contemporary life and feel like the peripheral spaces one might get a glimpse of on a Zoom call.

Page’s other work is a sculpture. Since 03 is made from another type of detritus: wallpaper print rollers. Page arranged the rolls, which are covered with patterns of tiny pins, into a grid. Its rigid, imposing form and spiky surfaces put the sculpture in an adversarial relationship to the viewer.

*Since 03*, a sculpture by Ian Page, at the FAWC visual arts fellows show. In the background are works by Cherrie Yu (left) and Elena Kovylyaeva (right). (Photo courtesy PAAM)

Cherrie Yu’s video piece Daily Diversions encapsulates the exhibition’s spirit of improvisation. Like Zerpa’s short film, it’s a work in progress. The video features pairs and trios of women dancing in nondescript gymnasiums alongside table-tennis players engaged in games (Yu draws from her experience as a choreographer and player of table tennis in this work). The dancers’ movements are synchronized, and in some of the scenes they move while positioning and repositioning wooden boards. Their actions become a sort of living sculpture, while the table-tennis players become a metaphor for the creative process: one that’s disciplined but also responsive, dynamic, and playful.

Down to Earth

The event: The FAWC visual arts fellows’ group exhibition
The time: Through March 23
The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
The cost: General admission: $15