Artist Dao Strom comes to St. Kate's as visiting artist

Strom performs at Embodied Voices, Embodied Silences event

Students and members of the community slowly start filing into the East Gallery where 35 chairs await for people to be seated. Videography of clouds, nature, and other scenes are projected onto the walls, a part of the multimedia curated exhibit Reverberating Bodies.

On March 16, the annual Amy Marie Sears Visiting Artist, Dao Strom, performed her music and poetry at the Catherine G. Murphy gallery. Along with her performance and exhibit, Strom also spent a one week residency on campus working with students on creating art.

The gallery’s website says, “Strom describes herself as an artist “who works in three ‘voices’—written, sung, visual—to contemplate hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories.”’ To create her art work, “she combines poetry, music, imagery and video to “explore themes of displacement, hauntings, mythos, memory, and echo,”’ according to the gallery’s website.

Guests file into the gallery as Dao Strom’s art is being projected on the walls. Strom’s art is mixed media including images, poem and song.

At the performance, Strom was joined by Ly Thuy Nguyen, who translated Strom’s work into Vietnamese.

The first reading was from her book You Will Always be Someone from Somewhere Else. Strom wrote the book in English, and was connected to Nguyen through a printing press in Hanoi, Vietnam to translate the book into Vietnamese.

Strom said that the book was not written as one page in English mirrored by a page in Vietnamese, instead, the two languages were intertwined. That is how they read the excerpt. It was a mix of English followed by Vietnamese translation and vice versa, as well as some overlapping of both languages at the same time.

Next, Nguyen read a song-poem Strom wrote as spoken word in Vietnamese before Strom strapped on her guitar and sang the poem musically.

The song-poem is titled “Break the Silence/Phá Vỡ Sự Yên Lặng.” It plays with the ideas from the mythological origin story of Vietnam. The story of the mother of Vietnam is that she was a fairy type entity who flew down to Earth with her sisters to explore. She ate a handful of dirt and could no longer fly, so she was stuck on Earth without her sisters where her tears created rivers.

After this song, Strom played two more song-poems, one of which titled “Traveler’s Ode.” The music is many sounds built on top of one another and her use of echoes as well as these sounds leave a haunting yet familiar feeling behind.

Strom finished up her residency with a reception of the exhibit on March 19. After exhibiting her work, guiding students, and performing, she leaves the campus with a lasting impact on those she interacted with.