Introducing Myrtle Tree Arts

Hello Friends of the Arts,

We want to share a bit about ourselves, our vision and purpose with you in this first post.
We're a collaborative group of artists, musicians, and experimenters seeking to create and elevate cultural activities through communal participation in the California Foothills and beyond. 
We, the co-founders, Paul Godwin and Ameera (Amee) Godwin, and along with longtime partner composer, Miguel Noya, are building on 
artistic efforts over the last decade--from hosting Talking Tree Ranch Artist Residencies to performing concerts in California and in Europe, we're continuing on a journey into the spirit of creative evolution through this new venue for collaboration. 

We welcome you to this venture in intentional creativity with community members as fellow artistic inventors. 

Join us and learn more! 

Email us: myrtletreearts@gmail.com

Insta: @myrtletreearts

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RIPE AREA: Renewing Relationships with Water Through Art

RIPE AREA is a play on the term "riparia", the land adjacent to and influenced by water. The waters of the South Fork of American River tumble downstream in the crush of ice melt, rushing in currents, propelled by dam releases, and slowing along sandy flatlands. Wet, fluid fingers fan out among cattails, quietly seeping into sodden ground. Over time, h umans have changed the river, eroded its banks, mined its tributaries, drained its meadows, and farmed its floodplains. The waters of the South Fork of the American River , for example, are contained by t hree major reservoirs and other smaller man-made reservoirs El Dorado County. The major dams are at Slab Creek Reservoir built in 1967, Chili Bar Reservoir built in 1964 and Folsom Lake Reservoir built in 1955 . Headwaters of the South Fork of the American River collect in high-altitude Lake Audrain, captured in the image I created, above, for the music and underwater sound art installation, Music for 33 Dr...

Ramparts: Centrum Artist Residency, Part 2

Arriving at Fort Worden sent me on a hunt about fortification history and architecture. Following trails through the woods to the top of Artillery Hill, Paul and I encounter the ramparts, solidly built gun emplacements known here as “batteries.” “Bulwark” is another term that feels related to the work from my first week at Centrum: large pencil drawings of entangled old growth cedar and spruce branches and roots. The “bul-” part of bulwark is related to bole, “tree trunk,” while -wark is related to English work, wrought, and wright. The last of the guns at the fort were removed in 1945, and the defunct battery enclosures, tunnels, stairwells, rusting doors and pipes, lichen-stained concrete, a stately sign with the name, Cornelius Tolles, a captain who died from his wounds in a Civil War battle—comprise these eerie tombs. We start to hymn and sing into the dark reverberating chambers. “What a performance venue!”, our eyes circling in their sockets as we imagine the possibilities....

Streams of Time in FIRE/LAND

The present is just a moment in the continuous unfolding of perceptions and experiences. In meditative practice, I actively try to observe the arising and vanishing of the present to develop the skills to be in the present with deeper awareness. Similarly, the rapid passing of frames of video, the interweaving of streams of images and sounds, is for me, a way of observing an ephemeral present. "Right View" by Ameera Godwin In this state of mind, I can start to experience a quality of "right view.": seeing what is true, and discerning how to respond, compassionately, ethically. I try to cultivate a relationship to temporality, "as an on-going purposeful effort to create one’s time and keep up one’s sensed continuity in time," as described by Estonian researcher, Kätlin Pulk . Working with digital video and using various non-narrative film approaches, my raw materials are the moving pixels with attributes like duration, speed, frequency, synchrony and as...

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