North Street Collective, a nonprofit program dedicated to celebrating Mendocino County by providing time and space for local and visiting artists to do new work and contribute to the community, is thrilled to welcome its first artist residents of 2017.

A native of both southern California and the Pacific Northwest, Karina Faulstich is a multi-media artist and performer whose work is largely focused on themes of feminism and ecology. Graduating from Pitzer College in 2015 with a self-designed major Creative Practice, Karina has since concentrated her studies on butoh dance, taking workshops internationally. She is a recipient of the Environmental Analysis Mellon Fellowship, which culminated in her art exhibit on ghost towns entitled Gold, God, & Ghosts. In 2016 Karina worked as the Assistant Director and Blood & Makeup Artist for the Vagrancy’s production of Macbeth in Los Angeles. Most recently Karina was living in Yellow Springs, Ohio, assisting with several performance art classes at Antioch College.

Seth Garcia holds a BA in Writing & Literature from Emmanuel College, where he helped found and edit the school’s first literary magazine, The Saintly Review. Recently, his writing has been influenced by assemblage art while focused on dissecting the process of involuntary memory. He is inspired by poets such as Ander Monson, Charlie Smith, Richard Siken, and Campbell McGrath.

Seth and Karina will be in residence at North Street from now until August 2017, to work on and share a collaborative project called, “Water Cups.”

“Effects of climate change—drought, flooding, and temperature extremes—become more prevalent each season. Globally, we witness water sources depleting, dangerous weather patterns emerging, and ecological balances being disrupted. This year’s relief of California’s severe drought, has been accompanied by equally severe flooding. With climate change, both droughts and floods will likely worsen, threatening our ability to sustain a balanced life,” they explain:
“Water Cups is a multi-media project proposed to examine the causes and effects of climate change on water system and peoples in the Mendocino area.”

Through this work, handmade clay cups will be crafted to include overlays of fragmented texts and images using a simple process of transferring ink-printed materials onto clay. The cups will receive a translucent glaze to highlight these juxtaposed words and images.

“Water Cups” will symbolize a purposeful reestablishment of human relationships to water, one more personal and intentional. Engaging archival and ethnographic research, this work will explore both Indigenous and Western modes of thought surrounding the natural world, specifically the resource of water.

Seth Garcia will create a series of interwoven poems responding to industrialization through local histories and stories about changing water systems and the ways they have affected the area and peoples. These poems will be fragmented and used as source material for transferring onto cups.

Karina Faulstich is a multi-media artist and performer whose work is largely concerned with the intersections of nature and society. Confronting Mendocino’s changing water systems within a global context, Karina will draw upon her work with ceramics to sculpt the cups.

Collaboratively, Karina and Seth will integrate other images and text found throughout their combined research. Although aesthetically linked, and crafted with similar materials and ideas, each Water Cup will be unique in the series. Accompanied by the cups will be a small handmade edition of Water Poemswritten by Seth throughout the residency.

Once the Water Cups are finished, Seth and Karina will host a community event in which Seth will recite his poetry while Karina performs a ritual to activate the cups. The event will allow Water Cups to be displayed and open further discourse surrounding climate change within the local/global context of Mendocino.

Karina and Seth explain,“This is a project of remediation; through the utilization and juxtaposition of cultures and experiences, these Water Cups will address, and symbolically redress, our current water crisis in the context of climate disruption. By transferring and overlaying fragments of history and poetic response, we wish to offer a visual and interactive experience that fosters contemplation of our changing experience with water,” says Karina.
​“New and radical understandings of our relationships with water are necessary if we are to create modern socio-natural systems that are sustaining,” they continue.

“Together, a North Street Collective Residency will allow us to work in an experimental fashion across several disciplines, sharing our strengths and developing a strong body of work responding to the way life evolves in tandem with water in the face of a dramatically changing and industrializing world.”

North Street Collective’s residency program will continue through October 2017. For more information, visit www.northstreetcollective.org or email Natasha at natasha@northstreetcollective.org