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Walking is a splendid act of personal faith. A whole body drawing in concert with terrestrial movements, through space and time. The things closest to us, touched by our own actions and bodies are often the easiest to take for granted. Facing reality affords a deeply transcendental experience through a symphony of senses. I went into art as a way to understand nature and found an insistence to return to nature’s teachings in reverence and wonder. Synesthesia was a term I later found ascribed to my human condition. As I walk through life, I encountered many people who unbeknownst to them (or me at the encounter) are seeking to harm or reduce others, to resist care or loving kindness, to force someone to change or be a certain way. In our complex society, I began to wonder, instead of the social influences impacting our temporality, how much the resonant qualities of a place are made by the way the land is. How much authorship can a human ascribe to their active choices, the places they inhabit, or a record of memories?
AMMAN FAMILY HISTORY, EXCERPT OF LIVES OF CONSCIENCE, LIVES OF COURAGE, YouTube presentation by Harriett Ammann.
Harriet Ammann is the author of Shaped by Lives of Conscience, Lives of Courage, a memoir about being born in Nazi Germany and how her family survived—and resisted—during that era.
Harriet’s grandmother, (my great great grandmother) Ellen Ammann, served in the Bavarian Parliament and was a part of the early political resistance to Hitler in the 1920s. Harriet’s parents continued that legacy of courage, sheltering two Jewish women in their home as part of an underground network. Harriet wrote her book to honor her family’s bravery. Born in 1939 into Nazi Germany, Harriet’s earliest years were shaped by a society unraveling under authoritarian rule. The family eventually ended up in America as booty of war as part of Operation Paperclip. Based on her memories, family letters, and research of 20th century German history, her family history begins with her grandmother, Ellen Ammann, a member of the Bavarian Parliament and part of the political resistance to Hitler in the 1920s. Grounded in their Catholic faith and trusting in close friends, her parents persevered during the war, imparting their strengths, values and moral code to their six children. Facing anti-German attitudes in the US in the decades after WWII and persistent questions to this day as to why the German people did not do more to stop Hitler, her memoir ends with personal reflections on the political challenges of our current times. Harriet Ammann, PhD, made a career in toxicology, public health, and teaching. She has presented, taught, testified, and published on toxic exposures and effects from air contaminants, molds, and on other health issues throughout the state, nation, and internationally. She was active in the peace, women’s, anti-nuclear, immigrant protection, and prisoner rights movements. She lives in Olympia, WA and follows in her parents’ footsteps in promoting and living her concerns for peace and justice, compassion and kindness. Purchase Harriett’s book here: https://browsersolympia.com/events/22765
On the 23rd of September, 1984, I was born of two loving parents, on a waning gibbous moon (by measure of the Gregorian calendar) to Dr. Chung’s hands in a birthing room alongside the Rock River, in Dixon, Illinois. My father worked in nuclear engineering operations at the Byron Power Station in Illinois, and my mother stayed home with us until I was about 12 years old. She tended to classrooms of children with developmentally challenged spectrums, which intensified during her 14+ years of service. My father’s work also amped up as executives in Chicago made fiscal decisions impacting the lives of people they never met. Two and a half hours Northwest of Chicago, we were surrounded by forest and fields. My brother and I attended public school. I focused so I could return home free to work on art projects after school. We had 4-TV channels and a time limit on watching or video games. To this day, I attribute clear boundaries and structure to developing the discipline required to focus on developing artistic skills while acing courses and graduating early.
Growing up with a nascent knowledge of social and political complexities, I focused on the surrounding forest, prairie, river valley beauty, local art, engineering, and native histories. I excelled in science and loved dance, and practiced tap, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, as well as piano because I had wanted to play drums and the requirement to do percussion was several years of piano lessons. The number of times I would let a rule block my way would end up becoming a pattern to work free from later on.
I was sensitive to the social dynamics I witnessed in my peers. Creative practices allowed me to focus on my preference for the company of the more experienced, as I often found my peers’ attitude much too flippant for my interests. My first artistic memories were being awarded “Artist of the Month” for faux-cave drawings (which I thought was a joke at the time but posed for the local newspaper picture anyway), and being awarded the best Earth Day visor design when I had to stay home from school sick with a throat infection. I recalled the children saying it was not fair because I had more time to work on the visor since I was at home sick. Little did they know, I spent very little time on the visor but fell into a wordless place that told me what to draw. This also started my research into demystifying the mysterious that compounded later with studies in the esoteric, philosophy, sociology, psychology, meditation, and spirituality.
In that, there was something different about the way I saw things, and withdrew from social dramas that were not engaging creative energy properly. I was always confused why humans sought pathologization instead of understanding and believed everyone must have synesthesia as I learned I did. Lineages and differences delighted and inspired me.
Dance training began in the cafeteria in 1990 and would remain a part of my life until college. After some gymnastics courses, I had a brief lapse with cheerleading; regretting the exploration and wishing I had stuck exclusively with tap, jazz, and ballet, so I could have become a dancer. As a youth, I pushed such thoughts aside, as I was also busy with the choir. The dream of being a performer made me uncomfortable despite the joy I gained in the activities.
After opening the piano during a family reunion in Maryland, I covered up my trespass of touching my relative’s furniture without permission by presenting my Oma with the keys I had opened, inviting her to play. When I heard the beautiful sounds, the fear, remorse, and guilt of my faux-pax were filled with feeling and beauty; I asked to learn and started practice on a keyboard, eventually proving I was serious enough to play on a real piano. From 1993 onward, I trained in classical piano for 12 years playing in the Lutheran Church for the congregation and hoping to compose and perform music someday such as my high school idol, Fiona Apple.
After failing an aptitude test by a few points to join an accelerated learning program in elementary school, I felt unchallenged and began to read philosophy. I preferred bookstores and libraries to rural partying schemes. Due to various frustrations and stresses at the time, I started yoga, meditation, and journaling around 1999. I knew inside, I would need to leave the small town to pursue my dream of attending art school.
In 2002, I completed my high school coursework early with honors and an independent study in fashion design. After working 2 jobs for several months, I moved to the suburbs in 2003 and began studying Interior Design in Schaumburg, Illinois. While in school, I lacked the confidence to forage into renovation design and switched majors to Advertising, so I could find work as a writer. Instead of moving to New York or L.A., I went to Chicago to be with my boyfriend and took up a serious interest in photography.
By 2006, I was living in Chicago, after completing a Bachelor of Art in Advertising, after nearly completing a BA in Interior Design. I had taken a study abroad course on culture in New Zealand and Australia. This was my first taste of international travel and first-hand experience with sheep farming for wool and free swimming amongst the Great Barrier Reef. Photography was a way for me to share beauty and pleasure with those I loved who were not able to be there.
After riding a tumultuous economic flux as a copywriter in Chicago, I moved around a bit and completed a 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training certificate in 2012. I moved to Winnetka, Illinois, and found work at a local gallery doing professional framing, glass cutting, and event photography, and eventually found work managing a gallery sales shop and events at the College of Lake County in Grayslake. I took the opportunity to study Darkroom and History of Photography courses and traveled on scholarship to Japan for Social Psychology, self-publishing my 2nd photography book, Bound By Water. The experiences working for 22nd Century Media challenged me to develop my photography skills in seeing the every day as complicated and humorous in nuance. I sought a way to teach art. I had come to admire the work of Edward Weston, Sally Mann, and Olafur Eliasson after installing the Moss Wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I felt creatively constricted by clichés in photography and sought to see where the limits of photography are and dig into meaning and the elements of being, becoming, and form relative to the way people see. Vision and Body would steer me through the next decade of research and work.
In 2013 my application to graduate school was accepted. Excited and deeply nervous, I moved to Los Angeles, California, quickly feeling overwhelmed by the difference I came to learn between Modernist values and Post-Modernity. I explored the events and technology developed during WWII, the psychological functions of photography, and trade histories in commerce and countercultural movements, phenomenological experience, trauma, and developed a concern about the impacts of technology on the human body, and the influence of politics and state on the nuclear family. As hate-driven social policies grew in popularity, I sought ways to expose people to the feeling of beauty in as direct ways as I could. My background and approach were faced with deconstructionist and post-modern philosophy in context to international perspectives in weekly 6-hour critiques. I balanced stress with several 90 minutes of yoga sessions and excessive hours in my studio exploring materials, methods, and processes.
In 2014, I met a consultant in technology and photography online who traveled from Trondheim to meet me in L.A. A few months later, I was going to Norway-a country I had never heard of. We developed a relationship and we decided to marry, so I could move to Norway to join him in 2015 to make a family after I completed my Master of Fine Art. Upon moving to Oslo, I became aware of the nuances in my family history, including my mother’s side having started Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago, and Ellen Aurora Elisabeth Morgenröte Ammann’s activism against national socialism and for women’s rights.
The move in 2015 to Norway was full of conflict; faced with pressures my efforts proved to have little impact, so I moved back to California in 2016 to live in Santa Monica, completing my first permanent public art installation, Teknovisuell Experience, and USPTO trademark for Yoto Studio. This stint in California was cut short due to health problems; I returned to live in Oslo in 2017, marking a busy series of years creating artwork and further studying the relationship between psychology and physiology. The developing interest in textiles picked up from a high school independent study in fashion design, led to testing products with my artwork printed on them and hand-knitting pieces for friends, family, and clients around the world. The slow evolution coupled with vision challenges after an eye trauma resulted in the continued pursuit of developing ideas for art people can touch and pedagogical coursework. As of today, my work remains within the medium best suited to the themes of the project. I sing, dance, and create with concentration, care, and sometimes joy whenever possible. 22+ years of photography are being released project-by-project. I’m looking forward to sharing my forthcoming books, exhibitions, and news of art projects with you.
After more than 23 years, I arrived at the notion places give the body knowledge, and these knowing senses are impressed into our biology. The geological sensibility of a place transfers into a sense-memory as a psychological and also anthropological force. Each body then encounters a terrain differently, for the matters that make up the body’s unique volition may create the sound board for conflict. Yet always seeking that common ground, I continually return to look toward the earth for cues in choice and how of move through the often painful truths. Painful in these truths, defy belief or logic. I turn toward methods in science to create tactile experiences. These multi-dimensional approaches have been laborsome. After all, how can one understand if everything matters, what actually does matter?
My work with eros (life) engages in conversations on the ways places make people, and our relationship with the landscape and bodies during technocratic times. The artworks nurture reverence for beauty and serve to engage parietal aspects of perception. While the works I create express psychological states we can find within the landscape, the work is also clearing time and space to engage in perceptual contemplation, where the experiences of art can lead to insights, connections, and understandings.
Moving to Norway and living through auto-immune challenges offered me opportunities to study relationships between biology and toxicology, physiology, and psychology. Immersive experiences of swimming in the black-bottomed lake Ånøya and hiking through sapphire twilight in Lofoten moved me to take up methods used in resonance recordings to connect my images and image textiles with geological records of places. The art in designing this æsthetic resonances project grows upon the sense of reverence for nature while moving the physical senses of Place into both art traditions and tactile experiences.
Thank you for joining me this far. I hope we meet to write the next decades with delight and reverence. These are my undergrad courses. 20 hours with art projects and 1-2 part-time jobs. I see now in retrospect the energy many put into a family, I had poured into my studies. Hopefully that study works out for something that proves beneficial: 
PERSONAL STATEMENT as of 16 March 2023 With the motive to add to the beauty I see in the world, I followed an intrinsic pull into art from a young age. I pursued several disciplines including dance, voice, piano, and eventually writing, painting, sculpture, photography. I dabbled with flute, clarinet, and collage, but found synesthesia was easiest to relate through media and performance. Often joking I was raised by wolves in the forest (since my father’s last name is Wolfe and our home was/is surrounded by nature), my imagination and senses were trained to the rhythms and perceptions from terrestrial life and an ancestral desire to live amidst mountains and sea. The ways art and science became bifurcated confounded me, as I found science easier to pass in school than art, but I found the demand of focus in art more engaging with the scientific methods to establish (epistemologies) around perceptual senses of space and time (proprioception and chronoception). I understand art as a soulful pursuit: a means of emancipation and transcendence. The art I make is less about personal expressions of emotions, persona and soul, and more about the poetic understandings I found working through an anthropological frame of focus: the ways places make people. Artistic research in conjunction with art making allows me to ensure viewers gain the remembrance of their souls’ sovereignty by engaging with artwork. Beauty and the sublime concurrent with sensations of stillness and movement, I work to inspire reverence in relationships with places, sensations, notions, and people. When I say my art is not self-expression, I mean that it is not defined by the privileging of identity present in the post-modern discourse today. The notions I am most occupied by are ways to illuminate myths and find ways to rid the mind of stories keeping people from remembering their agency. On my father’s Nordic/Germanic side: my great great grandmother, Ellen Amman and her sister Harriet Sündstrom, and my mother’s Italian/English go back to the Bavarian and Venetian conflicts. While I continually find myself creating at an intersection of Eurasian culture, my hope is that piecing together research in earnest through art inspires a memory that blossoms as beauty in the viewer. In the understanding of psyche meaning spirit, I noticed the deployment of social policies through systems of thought exposed a covert spiritual war tactic. My personal perspective aligns with organising around enduring virtues and principles of personal sovereignty, emancipation and transcendence of spirit. Therefore, I do refrain from advocating for substance intake in favour of learning how to use the systems of the body and nature to touch the beauty and love transcending through the forces of nature. While bettering material conditions improves the appearance of life, the qualities of life that illuminate the mind from the beauty in the heart arise from within. The fissures between the virtual and real have ripened our times for conflation, bloviation and dissolution. Therefore the nearly-universal experiences of the sublime in awe and reverie are what I seek to imbue in my evolving work as a poetic artist. The way I make artwork is very much an erotic engagement. The difference is in the subtlety of which I relate to what and how I am seeing. I am loving what I see, and whatever feeling what I am seeing makes inside my being I alchemise into love. Even if I am seeing pain, weeping through joy or grief, feeling the twist of anguish, there is a desire to show this process of life as unrelenting beauty. The results are often confronting, sorrowful, or in some eyes, seem as nothings. That sense of apathy or nothingness is why what I choose to frame, put down, move through, and the edits made are made to be as meditative and sensual as possible. While I can, and often do paint and dance, or sing, any work I am making is to engage deeply in feeling. There was always a time I look forward to the future, and never a time I could imagine people could become bifurcated and witness people reaching to the past. I feel there is a deep need to recollect our sense of soul. I believe that is why people perceive me as soulful, weird, or strange. Why should we take time for these things people associate with religions is not because religiosity castrates or placates hedonistic behaviours, but it is that we need the nourishment in some form. That is the erotic of the space and time for communing. There is no coincidence in churches becoming galleries. The signs as to what is occurring, what we are searching for, what our choices are created, draws out our forms in reality from the background of reality. Therefore, in the images I choose, or any artwork I make-I am careful to choose every aspect of the work possible, so I can be closer to sure the consequence of engaging with the art can bear a useful fruit for the viewer. To me, it is a considerable responsibility to have that kind of intimacy with those who engage with my artwork. We become what we practice and develop where we focus. Therefore the Vision-Body relationship brought my work with cameras and poetry into the realm of the senses, the tactile and performed. The research of Robert Sapowlsky, Elaine Scarry and Richard Grossinger give words to what I believe people have awareness of deep within their bones. My influences are many and varied; a harshly concise edit would be Kimsooja, Edward Burtynsky, Sally Mann, Olivier Debré, Michael Snow, Twyla Tharp, among plethora of rabbit hole studies that wove physics and meditation into geology, biology, and phenomenology. Seeing the body as the generative force in cognition takes up a biological locus of reasoning. Biology already being physical, informs materials and perception. This bottom-up perspective allows for self-awareness and seeks to emancipate viewers from top-down (ideology) politics. The bottom-up understanding affords greater agency in creating beauty and harmony as mother nature ultimately runs this show regardless of ideological understandings or misunderstandings. An ideologically driven or bottom-down motive has merit as well, though as defined clearly in Hito Stereyl’s work, is a favoured mode of psychological warfare. In a world mitigated by telematic interfaces, I persist through art because of its unique ability to work on subtle layers of culture. While culturally antagonistic trends in art continue, to work in service of beauty, vitality, healing, harmony, and truth seeking may realize art as the partner to science it always was and is for nurturing healthier knowledge that water the heart with beauty. After years of wrestling with images and questions with free-will, determinism, subjectivity, and agency, I saw a way to reorient my visual work materially and performatively in joining science, technology, images, performance, textiles, and magnetic resonances (or the ways the interior of material phenomena is depicted using the quantum mechanic effect of oscillating dipole frequencies). The project has a working title of æsthetic resonances and serves to weave a visual, common ground for unique subjective perspectives to relate with each other through the tactile qualities of the invisible, radiant energies vibrating between terrestrial and celestial elements.