Coming up on the Odyssey Simulator, Saturday November 30th at 4PM EST, the opening of Erika Steeves’ premiere art installation, “Little Histories,” a collection of new black-out poems and collage works.
Erika’s approach to art-making highlights how art offers a process, allowing selves to communicate across time. She is interested in how meaning sometimes emerges later and over time. This connection across time is nurtured through a willingness to explore and play. Each of these ‘little histories’ asks the viewer to engage in their own meaning-making.
Mark your calendars and meet us in Second Life on Saturday to JOIN US FOR THE LAUNCH.
We will also be live streaming the event, so stay tuned to our Instagram and Facebook feeds. If you’d like to catch the replay, that will be available a few days after the event by re-visiting our website.
ARTIST STATEMENT – “Little Histories” by Erika Steeves
These poems each capture a moment—me sitting at my desk, playing around with paper and words, letting everything melt away for a time—but I never had a plan for them. They would have happily sat in my journals if it weren’t for my friend JE asking me whether I’d ever considered sharing my art. I hadn’t, but I’m glad I took them up on it.
My sense has always been that meaning emerges later and doesn’t have to be the driver of art. Art making, for me, is for its own sake, as an act of alchemy between selves communicating across time via memory, flashes of deep curiosity, and a willingness to explore and make without overarching intention. That is, pure creation without working towards a finish line or goal.
They are indeed little hist›ories.
Each of these pieces started as discrete elements that I later massaged together into different forms. Some started as blackout poems, which I then turned into collages, using digital media tools to add sections of my abstract paintings and other art as backgrounds. They began as simple, playful moments, me paying attention to what I liked, what appealed to me in the act of creation itself. Collages and blackout poetry represent my peak creative Editor energy—they get me out of my head and onto the page/canvas where I can indulge in pure presence.
What emerged later, as I chose which poems to include in this show, was magical. How is it that individual moments—choosing colours, shapes, and words that speak to me—could somehow culminate in poems and collages that speak to each other, that call out and weave together overarching meaning? A creative alchemy began to emerge in conversation as a whole collection: I noticed themes of resistance, the creative process, beauty in decay, strength along the margins, and ultimately how language works through subtraction.
Art is life caught in amber—it acts like a stepping stone into our past, like a fossilized record. Then in the act of sharing it with others, who allow the surface of the poem or collage to be their starting point for new and completely personal meanings, it launches us into the future.
Art speaks through all of us.
Let it plant a seed.
Let it act as a springboard for action.
An antidote to despair.
ABOUT ERIKA STEEVES
Erika has worked as a professional book editor for over a decade. She has copy-edited and proofread hundreds of projects for both traditionally published and independent authors in Canada and beyond. Her work spans academic publishing, nonfiction, and speculative fiction, including short stories, novellas, and anthologies that defy convention and reimagine the world and our place in it.
As lead editor of the Journal of Speculative Literature, she successfully oversaw the publication of four anthologies for House of Zolo, an artist collective founded in 2019 in Toronto. The Amazon-bestselling Journal showcases a rich blend of poetry and short stories from some of the most talented writers in the world.
Erika is an emerging mixed media artist, with an interest in collage and blackout poetry. “Little Histories” is her debut art show.