This is part two of Josiane Keller’s project. Do visit part I and also Keller’s Commentary about her work. Links are below.
Each reflection of myself echoes a different emotion at me – 20 Heroes from the City of Roses by Josiane Keller, arrived in CFile’s submission box and caused much excitement at CFile. It is a project that resulted in twenty ceramic portraits translated into 2-D photographic images. The subjects were fifteen street youths who are clients at p:ear, a support facility, three of its staff and two volunteers. It is one of the most exceptional submissions we have received and an entirely different way of looking at ceramics as art.
Above image: Josiane Keller, Kathryn (age 23), photograph of ceramic figure
“My mother passed away, my father was abusive. My friends got sick of me, I moved to Portland nowhere to live. I found OUTSIDE IN and got the mental and emotional support I need.
“I stick to the same routine every day; Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays I stay at OUTSIDE IN for breakfast and walk to the library at one. I go back to lunch and stay til 6, doing activities with staff. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I go to the library and hang out til meal times or therapy.
“Saturdays are the hardest days for me because OUTSIDE IN is closed and it’s hard to find anything to keep myself productive.
“I am schizo-affective. I think about that so much, it’s not fun. I say. Do, hear things that I don’t realize I’m doing. I was abused growing up, not so much physical, but mentally and emotionally and verbally.
Kathryn’s answer to the question of where her figure should be set.
“The area I am in is very white, glowing WHITE, mirrors are everywhere reflecting all my movements, facial expressions, body gestures, EVERYWHERE I go I can’t escape from me. Above are long fluorescent lights much like the ones seen in hospitals, they are fastened to the ceiling.
“Each reflection of myself echoes a different emotion at me, screaming, one is crying, one is curled up and catatonic, one is laughing at me chaotically, another is very happy.”
Any thoughts about this post? Share yours in the comment box below.
Josiane Keller, Ladybug (age 23), photographs of ceramic figure with questionaire
“I’m pregnant.”
Ladybug had a miscarriage a couple of weeks after the interview.
Josiane Keller, Koala (age 18), photograph of ceramic figure. All photographs courtesy of the artist.
“Starting at a young age I was very neglected, kind of just along for the ride, being pushed back and forth between parents, always moving, depressed and lonely. At a young age I started using drugs and drinking a lot. And always surrounded by it at home. I’m the youngest of five, and never really spent much time with my two oldest sisters and two brothers after that. Anyway my mother couldn’t handle that at 40 she was still taking care of kids and my habits that came along with it, so she sent me to Eugene, Oregon, after about a month of so on the streets in Huntington Beach, CA. After living with my sister for a while she kicked me out. For about five years I’ve been on and off the streets, started hopping trains and traveling around. I’ve always been the artist/musician type that would rather be alone with drugs, cigs, booze, with my own thoughts, depressed, listening to Radiohead, making music and art. Piano is my favorite.
“You could probably find me in a café, drawing or walking, listening to head phones, people watching, high on meth or heroin.
“Will we ever get it right? Time to ascend to the 4th dimension. I will die and be reborn on another planet. (…)
“Who the hell really knows?
“‘While you make pretty speeches,
I’m being cut to shreds,
You feed me to the lions,
A delicate balance.
And this just feels like spinning plates
My body’s floating down the muddy river.’
“Like Spinning Plates” /Amnesia album, Tom Yorke of Radiohead.”
Josiane Keller, NaNa (age 23), photograph of ceramic figure
“When I was 16 I got pregnant with my daughter. I first moved to California to live with my birth mother and finish high school. My daughter and I ended up in foster care and after three homes I brought her to Portland to live with my sister for stability. When I finished school I also settled in Portland to live with my baby’s daddy’s parents.
“At first everything went well. I got a job and was saving to get a place for me and my daughter. Then in January 2007 my sister told me that she was going to adopt my daughter and threatened me into signing off my rights. After that happened I gave up. I stopped going to work and so I lost my job, After a month of not being able to find another job my ‘in-laws’ kicked me out and I ended up in OUTSIDE IN.
“While I haven’t been homeless since May 2009 I think about my time on the streets often. The thing I remember most – the thing that hurts the most – is when I got pregnant September 2008. I was so happy and knew there was help available to get me off the streets before the baby came. I started job hunting again, stopped drinking, and was feeling great. But the father ‘wasn’t ready’ and said he would leave me if I didn’t get an abortion.
“I don’t believe in abortion but I was so co-dependent and so desperate to be loved that I went through with it. I wish I had known then what would happen after.
“He left me after the abortion was done, while I was asleep in recovery, to go sleep with another girl. I will never forget that experience and I will never forgive myself.”
Josiane Keller, SKY (age 24), photograph of ceramic figure
“I do not live on the streets. I volunteer at p:ear with students that do. I live in Northwest Portland and share an apartment with my boyfriend. I am a college senior and doing an internship at p:ear to complete my Bachelor’s degree.
“I have never been homeless but have been unemployed and broke enough to have to move in with a parent. At one point I was living in a shared house with five other people who all moved out unexpectedly so I was forced to move out of the house (my options were to be forced out or pay all 1300$ a month in rent myself while finding new room-mates, so I moved into my dad’s basement).
“I definitely think I could have ended up on the streets several times if I didn’t have such supportive parents, mainly my mother.
“My parents help me pay my expenses while I’m in school. I split my living expenses with my boyfriend to make things cheaper. I look for odd jobs to make extra money by doing things like babysitting, childcare, selling my stuff like clothes, books and electronics and even exotic dancing. My boyfriend and I receive government aid in the form of food stamps. We get 365$ a month to spend on food, but it usually only lasts us about 3 weeks. We are both under our parents’ health insurance plans, but I am worried about mine running out when I turn 26 in less than 1 ½ years.
“I have had a hard time finding and keeping jobs in the city. I have mostly worked in restaurants as a waitress but have always been mistreated by my managers or other staff at those places. I grew up in a challenging household; my dad was verbally and physically abusive, so I have a way of finding environments or relationships that put me in that victim position again.
“Between age 11 and 23 I was on a lot of different medications, mostly for severe depression but also some anxiety. At 23 I took a year to study abroad in India and Tanzania in a college program, which is where I met my boyfriend. While in India I went off all my anti-depressant medication cold-turkey which was hard but I felt ready to no longer be numbing myself with chemicals.
“My passion is art and teaching which is what brought me to p:ear. I hope to work with children as an art teacher someday.”
Josiane Keller, STEPHANIE (age 30), photograph of ceramic figure
“I try to make other people’s lives easier. But I like being a supportive actor; it makes me feel useful and needed. I like to spend the mornings at p:ear reading the paper and drinking tea. It’s a calming ritual to start the day.
“I’m not very good at talking about myself on an intimate level, but I wanted to participate in this project as a personal experiment. I’ve always liked FREUD’s original title for “Civilization and its Discontent” (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur”) because I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable, slightly awkward moving through life. But those moments of awkwardness for me are like small pin pricks of consciousness: they remind me of the person I am and to be present in moment.
“P:ear is a constant pin prick to be awake, to be conscious, to engage with life and to witness the lives of these kids. Sometimes I feel like the most important thing we can offer here is to listen and be a witness.
“Each year I set a focus (not resolutions, which feel too trite) and this year’s focus came to me after a long bike ride. I go on long bike rides because breathing is cleansing and the suffering is purifying. Physical stress reduces everything down basic needs: oxygen, energy, will-power, and my mind tends to whittle down all the swirling thoughts to something simple.
“This year is all about authenticity for me. I want to live a life that is authentic.”
Josiane Keller, Claire (age 59), photograph of ceramic figure
“I didn’t live on the streets. I graduated from high school at 17 and left home due to ‘irreconcilable differences’ with my parents. I spent a year living on the edge with my boyfriend in crap apartments taking waitress jobs, telephone solicitation or whatever else I could get.
“After that year I saw how my life was going to be useless unless I did something drastic, so I joined the military, became a dental assistant and got a college education. I ran a number of different businesses.
“I have compromised my time but rarely my values.
“I had been living in rural Colorado and moved to San Francisco. I’d seen rural poverty, but nothing on the scale of San Francisco. I went to the grocery store and there was so much produce it was nearly rotting off the shelves; when I went to the parking lot there was a guy who was going through the dumpster looking for something to eat. I’ve never understood this kind of food inequality.
“A large part of my life revolves around food, helping provide food for p:ear and an interest in getting and making the best quality food for my family. Food is human fuel – it nourishes the mind and heart as well as the body.”
Josiane Keller, CHUCK (age 44), photograph of ceramic figure
“I am a man in the United States. With my girlfriend of 21 years, I own more of the value of our green house than the institution that holds our mortgage. (…)
“Our city is now considered fashionable by people whose opinions appear in magazines and in the newspaper of record.
“Neither my girlfriend nor I were born in this city. We have lived here for eleven years. (…)
“I am an immigrant. One of my birth country’s official languages is English, of which I am a native speaker, in an accent nor recognizably foreign to Americans. I am white. When I tell other white people that I am an immigrant, more often than not they first think I am kidding, and then, when I gently insist, give me a look that I interpret as meaning, ‘oh, you’re not really.’
“I have lived in six cities. More if you count different apartments or houses in the same metropolitan area. Like most others of my class in my city, I live a portion of life on the street. When I am doing my living on the street, I don’t worry about food, shelter, harassment by authority or by others, nor, for the vast part, personal security. Instead I worry about how I am perceived by others, about whether I will make enough money to validate my self-identity, and about the nature of fulfillment. (…)
“I have a small office downtown. It is nine feet wide and about fifteen feet long. (…) The view out of the window is of a brick office building with white window frames, windows set in sets of three. (…)
“On Wednesdays I volunteer at p:ear. I am a mentor to homeless and transitional youth. I think the age range is 15 to 24. I listen and joke with the kids. I run the dishwasher and clean up. I try to be funny. In some cases I don’t have to listen very much to be freely offered information. Some of these things are true, and some are not. Some stories are embellished.
“Here are a few things I have learned from various sources, and some personal anecdotes:
“1). A chain of convenience stores known as ‘Plaid Pantry’ is a good place to shop lift because they have a ‘no chase policy,’ which means the clerk will not take physical action to stop you. If you can run fast enough to be gone by the time police arrive, you are safe.
“2). If you are trying to buy marijuana from someone on the street, and he takes your money and runs without completing the deal, and you chase him to retrieve your money, to the police it will appear as if you are the aggressor/party at fault, and you will go to jail.
“3). If your bicycle is stolen, and you call the police, and they come and you tell them your name, and they look up your name and find out that there is a warrant for your arrest in a neighboring city, indeed, a city known for issuing warrants for small things like unpaid jaywalking tickets, then you will be arrested, and you will still not have your bicycle back.
“4). It is possible for one to be a young man who is a talented painter, musician, and computer programmer, who enjoys reading philosophy, and whose erotic capital is of value enough to appeal to particular sorts of nerdy young women even in the face of short stature and slight build, and still to be so lonely and angry to think that there can never be true personal freedom and that no physical institution could be worse than the mental prison of everyday existence.
“5). Very small acts of kindness count. One day, all the coffee cups were dirty and a young man asked me if there were any clean. I washed one and with a look of great surprise and a smile he told me I made his day.
“6). Homeless kids can be picky eaters.
“7). Cats can be trained to wait for you, sleeping on your backpack until you return.
“8). Dental floss makes very good thread for sewing leather and jeans.
“9). The school system can serve students so poorly that a man in his twenties does not know how to add fractions.
“10). If you don’t want people to bother you and you can afford the train fare, a great place to go is a bookstore in a suburban mall, where they are not on the lookout for homeless teens. If you are quiet and like to read, you can spend all day there.”
Josiane Keller, Pippa (age 39), photograph of ceramic figure
“I don’t live on the street, but work with those that do. When I was a teenager, however, I dressed like a punk, specifically ‘Goth,’ and had a troubled home life. I spent a lot of time downtown, and most of my friends were homeless and going to shelters and programs like the one I now run.
“My daily routine begins with yoga or meditation, and then I go to p:ear, most days. My job is multi-fold as so I engage with young, homeless people, make eye-contact, remember names, make coffee, respond to 30-60 mails a day, organize fund raisers, and generally try to get along with people and remember their worth.
“I value the transformation more than healing.
“I am round-ish, like the planet Jupiter, but without the atmosphere. A mix between hot + cold, but without being medium. How does one describe: fluffy but hard. (…) And I can fly.
“I dream of the ocean and whales a lot these days.”
Read part one of our coverage of Josiane Keller
Read Josiane Keller’s Commentary on CFile
Add your valued opinion to this post.