About

Artist Statement

mistakes are holy

I make music with toys, broken tape recorders, wrong notes and awkward gestures. The sound of music through a tiny speaker just as the batteries are failing is absurdly touching to me. I feel a strong affinity for things that don’t fit – as I believe they may not have yet found their context in which their resonance can be felt, and the practice for me is making space for these shy vibrations.

I have a similarly low tech approach to photography that often involves what I like to call re-visitations. For me this invokes the apparitional quality of re-photographing my own images to see what might appear or transfigure – and with hope of translating something of the strange beauty within the wound that is the dissolution of the known. I am more curious about the inherent nature of the reflections than in the demonstrative quality of the images. These chance apparitions as inscriptions to navigate uncertainty, opening to dimensions of experience.

Thank you for visiting,

Katie Griesar

Background

Originally from Dobbs Ferry, NY, I spent many summers on the coast of Maine, and am currently based in Portland, Oregon.

I have a BA from Vassar College in English/Creative Writing and graduated from the short lived play-writing program at the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University, where I had the good fortune to attend classes and workshops with Robert Brustein, John Guare and Jean Claude van Itallie among others. Invited to serve as guitarist for director Robert Wilson’s workshop of “When We Dead Awaken,” I was accompanist to tap dancer Honi Coles.

In Portland, Oregon I worked at independent theatres, a circus school, vintage guitar shop, and a warehouse painting parade floats. I co-founded Downtairs Recording, a small  independent recording studio, and performed in various bands – Waltzing Mice, Hedge, Wooden Nickle, Durango Park, Luminous Things. I made music for various theatre and dance performances, films and art installations, and have performed at  Imago Theatre, Performance Works NW, Conduit, the Portland Art Museum, the Crystal Ballroom, Doug Fir, La Luna, Satyricon, Berbati’s, Dante’s, Rontom’s, among other venues.

I became Resident Composer of Imago Theatre, a local theatre company that tours both nationally and internationally. For Imago I worked on more than twenty shows, making original music/scores for their acclaimed commercial touring works – FROGZ, Biglittlethings and ZooZoo, as well as as their more experimental original works and inventive re-imaginings of classic texts. Via Imago’s touring shows, my music has been heard and clapped along with throughout the US, Canada, parts of Europe and Asia, as well as in the New Victory Theatre on Broadway in NYC.

Additional Credits and References

My freelance music work led me to work with choreographers Linda Austin, Mary Oslund (Oslund+Co),  Jessica Hightower, Catherine Egan, Cydney Wilkes, POV Dance,

filmmakers David Bryant, James Westby, Lars C. Larsen, Charles Daniels, Mona Huneidi, Patti Lewis, William Curly Johnson,

visual artist Kindra Crick,

theatre artists – Imago, Susannah Mars, Danielle Vermette, Marc Weaver, hopeless theatre, Defunkt Theatre, liminal theatre.

Recordings include CD soundtrack to Imago’s FROGZ,  various CD recordings with Durango Park, Luminous Things, Wooden Nickle, and I played pedal steel guitar on the Sophe Lux CD “Plastic Apple.”

One of my images was used by the artist George RedHawk, who is legally blind, to demonstrate the “RedHawk effect” – a layering technique he developed to animate still photographs to illustrate the disorientation he experiences from his vision impairment – as seen on multiple outlets including Thermal Journal, Bored Panda, Buzzfeed and My Modern Met.

one of my photographs and ephemeral installation works referenced (pages 10 and 15) in the 2016 AQA GCSE Art Exam in England, Wales and Northern Ireland;

one of my photos referenced in  Creating Divine Art: On the Origin of Inspiration  by musician/author Daniel Perret

my photo/ephemeral work was also referenced on The Daily Kos

I was a featured artist on Michael Ferentino’s music blog – Bedtime for Robots

I was a featured photographer in Visions by****contrasted gallery, online photo magazine, “Beyond Photography” issue; Curator: Annalisa Ceolin

featured artist/photography, Book of Souls Gallery/group show, North Park University; curator: Tim Lowly

featured artist/music+photography slide show, PushPull at Bank Street Arts, Sheffield, UK; curator: Andrew Conroy

image included in window gallery group exhibition “Force of Nature” at Galerie de Vilf Ramen, Arnhem, Netherlands; curator: Max Kuiper

cd cover image and insert booklet images for Emmanuel Holterbach’s La reve, l’ombre et la vision – on   label Canti Magnetici, Italy

made the music for these fantastic stop motion animations by artist Mona Huneidi – here and here

photos featured on multiple blogs including”Finding Lost Time” curated by artist Andrew Conroy

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email: kgriesar@hevanet.com

images © 2021 by Katie Griesar

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