Page 38 - the NOISE August 2013

aSSembling acroSS time & Space
by Sarah gianelli
with culture in mind, re-use intact
Sally Stryker is, first and foremost, a story- artist and teacher, was born and raised on
it’s mine now too. She was a real inspiration, and a very unusual lady ... very deep and quiet.” But instead of continuing to describe her, Ms. Stryker tells me a story she wrote called “Walking in Momma’s Moccasins.” In it, daughter goes into the closet and a box of mother’s shoes falls down: her teaching shoes, her dress up shoes, her square danc- ing shoes and, at the very bottom, her favor- ite moccasins.
“So I put on her moccasins and begin to tell her story — her connection to the land, her early childhood...”
To Ms. Stryker, her mother’s art demon- strates more of a Hopi influence than her own — more serious and made solely of metal —but the similarities are undeniable.
Outside her front door, a playful dragon made by Ms. Stryker and an atypically whim- sical angel made by her mother hang side by side.
“I love the idea of finding something that’s been used for one thing and tossed in the dump. Well, Sally comes along,” she says, slip- ping naturally into story mode, “and goes,
‘Oh! Interesting shapes, interesting colors; look what the elements did to that!’ I like the idea of picking up something discarded as useless and making something new from it. That relates to life too — we can toss pieces of our lives away, say ‘I don’t need that any- more,’ but somehow they’re still a part of us and we come to transform them in a way.”
“I think that my found art assemblages are another way of telling stories. I don’t have a formed story about ‘dragon’ but I think it’s about transformation too. He’s gotten a bad rap — he’s always ferocious and the prince has to kill the dragon to save the maiden. We can think of the dragon with fear or we can befriend him, and not see the fearful part of life as something to inhibit us.”
Much of Ms. Stryker’s art is light and hu-
morous and does not have a deeper mean- ing beyond her intent to elicit a chuckle. Even if they don’t, they certainly give the art- ist a chuckle.
“A lot of my pieces are just fun,” she con- tinues. “I have a philosophy that life should be played with. Sure, there are parts of our lives to take seriously, but there’s also a part that can be very joyful and childlike. Kids are so spontaneous, but somehow we get older and get very serious and forget how to play.”
For “Jerome Rocks!” the Co-op’s biannual membership show, in which members have the opportunity to exhibit a work outside their usual medium, Ms. Stryker made her very own shady lady, The Soiled Dove, out of a vintage canvas boot cover accented with eyelet lace, old pop tops for heavy-lidded eyes, and an old ceramic faucet handle turned up to “hot” at the base.
In another area of the Co-op, is a collec- tion of her more native-inspired pieces.
“Some might call them primitive,” she says, “as they do with a lot of Native art, but are
they really? Or is there quite a sophistica- tion to the work they do? I think the ancient Native people understood some depths that modern people don’t get. They didn’t see themselves as separate from, or better than, the natural world. They saw themselves as part of it.”
The Jerome Artist Cooperative Gallery is open daily from 10AM-6PM and located at 502 Main Street in Jerome. Visit jeromecoop. com or call 928-639-4276 for more informa- tion.
| Sarah gianelli knows her italian deserts. sarahgianelli@hotmail.com
teller. It is how she responds to, interacts with, makes sense of, and in the most child- like sense, plays with, the human experience of being alive. Her figurative found art as- semblages, on display at the Jerome Artist Cooperative, are only one means through which she expresses the stories that sponta- neously spring to life in her imagination. She also writes, paints, dances, and tells her tales in the most traditional form, orally, to groups of young and old alike.
I was surprised to find out that it was a Caucasian woman that created the distinctly Native American figures — human, animal and mythical — that comprise the bulk of Ms. Stryker’s collection at the Co-op. Crafted out of recycled wood and metal, they are adorned with feathers, fur, swaths of wo- ven fabric, and bestowed with Hopi names such as Hoponga (Woodpecker), Tuumokta (Dreamed About Something), and Mantawa (Sweet Heart). But after speaking with Ms. Stryker, and hearing her family’s story, it be- gins to seem entirely feasible that creative ways of interpreting the world can pass be- tween cultures as well as generations.
Ms. Stryker’s maternal grandparents, the Frys, were Mennonite missionaries and farm- ers on the Hopi Lands north of Flagstaff in the early 1900s. Her grandfather was one of few white men fluent in their native tongue and forged a relationship with the Hopi people that someone who did not speak the language could not.
“After awhile I think it became less of a con- version thing and more of a friendship,” she says. “I think he came to understand in a very deep way that yes, he had his Christian faith, but they had their own very ancient faith as well. When we had his funeral many, many Hopi were in attendance.”
Her mother, Winifred Stryker, a respected
the Reservation and the experience had a lifelong influence on her work that would trickle down to her daughter.
Eventually, the Frys moved south where the family homesteaded much of modern day Page Springs, a 6.5-acre parcel of which Ms. Stryker now calls home, as did her moth- er before her.
A stone’s throw off Page Springs Road, down a bumpy gravel drive, sits a quaint, old red schoolhouse with a low slung cowboy porch and little bell tower on top. The sound of children playing in the creek (the inspira- tion for a story called Children of Summer), the lack of cell phone service, the breeze and chatter of wildlife, lends a bucolic timeless- ness to the land, and a sense of simpler days gone by.
The schoolhouse was moved from its original location down the road in the 1940s and was kept in the family as something of a retreat until her mother rescued it from disrepair and made it her full time home. Ms. Stryker, who was born in the United Verde Hospital (now The Jerome Grand Hotel), built her adult life in Southern California as an English and art teacher, and came back to the area to care for her ailing mother in the late 1980s. After she passed, Ms. Stryker could not bring herself to leave.
Inside the charming one room house, a wooden ladder leads to a bedroom loft and her grandmother’s antique cook stove (a rel- ic that gave rise to a story called “Life’s a Ban- quet”) squats in the corner. A large portrait of her mother hangs on one wall and three of her mother’s figurative found art reliefs, another.
“This place is still very much hers,” she says. “I have her books, her art, her ashes,” indicat-
ing a container on top of a bookshelf. “But
38 • AUGUST 2013 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us