Open Space Go to Source Author: Xandra IbarraPowered by WPeMatico

Anna Atkins, Asplenium radicans (Jamaica), ca. 1850 In July, just before the beginning of hurricane season, Open Space managing editor Gordon Faylor approached me about contributing to the platform’s Microclimates issue. The following pieces of media — sound and text — were each composed weeks before the emergence of the storm system that eventually became [...]

Rocky Rivera at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. All photos: Pendarvis Harshaw. For the next few months, I’ll be doing audio interviews with mothers who are artists, asking them for their definition of love, and how that definition is exemplified in their relationships with their family, as well as how they show that love through [...]

Graphic: Omar Mohammad. When we struggle to explain the inherent qualities of a medium, we tend to defer to analogies and metaphors. This is especially true of the internet. Clouds, highways, streams, and real estate are just a few examples of the concepts employed to represent this intangible invention. Staring into a screen, it’s easy [...]

  Joseph Liatela, Untitled XI, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. A couple years ago The Third Thing, my messy feminist performance art duo with poet Ivy Johnson, was invited to play “poetry whores” at The Poetry Brothel. The Brothel was founded in New York City in 2008 by Stephanie Berger and Nicholas Adamski, though a [...]

Author’s note: Significant trigger warnings for sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse, and sexual abuse by a medical practitioner. My friend is standing in front of her wardrobe. I am trying to make a film about her for a school project. So far, I have: still black-and-white film photographs I took of her at the beach [...]

I am Mandan and Hidatsa from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in Western ND, as well as German from Eastern ND. Fort Berthold is home, but I was raised throughout the Midwest, in ND, MT, OK, and NE. My father’s life mission as the superintendent of various National Parks is to bring the Native side [...]

I begin by thanking: Kat Burdine, Lauren Davies, Elizabeth Emery, Sarah Kabot, Amanda King, Kelley O’Brien, Jessica Pinsky, Noelle Richard, Julie Schenkelberg, Corrie Slawson, Barbara Tannenbaum, Christina Vassallo, and Megan Young, who were generous with their time and words. Sarah Kabot, Open Closed, Closed Open, 2009; plastic signs; 8.5 x 11 in. Last June and [...]